I lost a bowl of stew once.

I stopped by my parents' house one evening, and found that my mom had made a big pot of stew (she makes the best stew I've ever tasted--scrambled eggs, too--and Chex Mix). I did whatever it was I'd come there to do, and then, as I prepared to leave, I grabbed a Tupperware bowl out of the cabinet and ladled some stew into the dish to take home for dinner.

A very few minutes later, I was ready to walk out the door, but realized I didn't have the bowl of stew in my hands anymore. I walked back to the kitchen, but it wasn't on the counters.

Think: where had I been in the five minutes since pouring the stew?
The den? No.
The bathroom? No.
It was not a big house.

I started looking in all the rooms, even the ones I knew I hadn't been in. The living room. The bedrooms. My parents' bathroom. I checked the refrigerator. No. What the HELL?

I began to question whether I had actually poured the stew at all. Yes, I was sure I had. And I do not come from a family known for practical jokes or magical powers. The damned stew was somewhere.

I checked all the rooms again. The refrigerator again. The kitchen cabinets (I've been known to put the cereal box in the fridge and the milk carton in the pantry). By now it was beyond absurd.

THIS IS BEYOND ABSURD, I thought, stomping furiously down the hall for the third or fourth time. FINE, then, I'll start looking in the most ABSURD places possible, and to prove my point, as I passed the linen closet, I grabbed the door handle and flung it open dramatically, thinking, it couldn't possibly be in HERE, and there on the third shelf sat my little bowl of stew.

I cocked my head, narrowed my eyes, and stared at it for a second. Then I remembered having gone to the closet a few minutes earlier to fetch a washcloth... or a pillowcase... or some trivial thing so insignificant that the fetching of it hadn't even registered in my brain. But the insignificant fetching had required a two-handed search to sort through the stack of linens, so I'd set the stew down, and then forgotten about it by the time I'd retrieved whatever it was I'd been looking for.

Poor, forgotten stew.

But delicious.