Letting Go of Letting Go

I've posted before of losing things. Things like what? Objects, objets d'art, detritus, money, talismans, omens, flotsam, jetsam, effluvia, phylacteries, memorabilia, memory, vice, virtue, navel lint, connection, magnetism, mass, thinness, agility, and gravity; not to mention love and loved ones.

I can't find my Obama campaign button.

Bothers the hell out of me.

For weeks and weeks, I know precisely where I had kept it: on my bureau (actually my wife's but I've been using part of the top of it since I've lived here), right next to my deodorant. That is a rock-solid certainty.

Then several days ago, I retrieved the button. Why? I guess to wear it for the inaugural events. A badge of pride.

But I didn't wear it. I kept it in my coat pocket, the pocket of my winter coat, fingering it like a novitiate telling his beads, keeping track of the button's whereabouts so I would not misplace it.

Then I extracted it at some point out of my coat pocket for, um, safekeeping.

Gawd!

Right.

Where?

God knows (presumably) (is it not presumptuous of us to assign the metaphysical boundaries of omnipotent knowledge? Maybe I've placed this mere object beyond the verge?).

It's not just the fetshistic and ritualistic attachments I am prone to, not just the neurotic-obsessive -compulsive mania; it's also the abject despair of: This Is It. This Is What the Sunset Years Will Consist Of. This And So Much Painfully More.

Plus, the shame of knowing that no one believes me when I say I know exactly where it was (past tense being operative here).

Spare us, O Lord.

Isn't that the refrain of many a litany?

The Litany of the Lost?