"Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey?"

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I reflect on that whenever there's someone or something missing to me. I certainly see the truth in it, or more accurately feel the truth in it. I've felt it often when there was someone I wanted to have near and couldn't. I've felt it keenly with things as well as people. I remember the phantom impulses I constantly felt to do something on my computer for a long stretch when I knew full well the computer was unquestionably and completely out of action. Sometimes when possessions have been not just inaccessible but physically present, it's been difficult to think of anything else or have proper perspective. It's often been something trivial, such as a library book or something lost in the mail.

Recently there was just such a situation. That is to say that something was lost in the mail. To be truthful, I knew where it probably was. It was a dvd I had rented- the first one since I moved to my present quarters. Consequently, I had not updated my address on the website. After I realized this, I figured that the disc would find its way to me anyway thanks to the forwarding request which I did have the forethought to fill out. It seemed a sure thing that this would solve the problem, remembering as I did an incident from the past where I had made such a forwarding request to my address at college. An attempt to have my movies sent back home while I was on vacation failed when the post office caught them and sent them to my college dorm. I was very concerned until I got back to Chicago for the next semester. Anyway, I was sure that there would be no trouble this time given the trouble I had that time.

Over and over, I checked to be sure that enough time had passed for the forward to take hold. Days went by, and nothing came in. Not the disc or anything else originally addressed to the old place. I got frantic, then merely worried, then concerned, and finally fed up. That sounds mixed-up, maybe, but that's how I am. Finally I decided that the actions I had taken with the old landlady and the post office were not worth attempting again. It was time to take my problem to the big boys- the people at the video rental site itself. As I had with the library book I lost, I simply paid to make the problem go away. It proved to be more affordable in this case than it was with the library, who gouged me with impunity. I didn't mind that, as I said then. With this company, I would have been more upset, as it's no charity case. They charged me a reasonable fee, I got in no trouble, and the flow of movies began again.

Only then did I think of the lost time. I might have done this at the outset, and not have suffered from the anguish I felt. Practically speaking, I did not really suffer an interruption of movies. As I've noted in the past, I have long leavened my rented allotment with trips to the library in order to avail myself of their very reasonable selection. I guess that in the indulgence of his emotions, the human being is an extremely irrational being. Thousands of years after discovering reason, we're really not much closer to understanding why I would act as I did and feel as I did and do. Maybe we don't want to know. Maybe explaining ourselves would be like explaining a joke, which loses its vitality when disassembled and laid bare for all to see.