Safe place is just too safe

It’s around here somewhere. Just don’t ask where.
I don’t so much lose things as hide them from myself.
The first time I remember doing this I was about 12 years old.
Stamp collecting had become a tentative hobby at the time. Tentative because I wasn’t terribly enthused about it.
My older brother had collected stamps for a while, and I liked looking at his stamp album, so I thought I’d give it a try.
Later, I shifted to coin collecting. But that didn’t really grab my interest for long.
There were a few stamps I found particularly interesting, and because I didn’t have an album of my own, I decided to do something special to save them.
For reasons only understandable to a 12-year-old, I pulled a thick book down from my parents’ bookcase and placed the stamps inside the book on a specific page. The plan was, apparently, that I’d memorize the page number and be able to retrieve the stamps at will.
Of course, within a week I had forgotten the page number. Today, I couldn’t tell you the name of the book.
The stamps long ago disappeared into the ether. Someone may have found them after buying a box of books at auction or while leafing through an old volume at a used bookstore.
That’s what happens when you hide things from yourself too well.
The incident of the disappearing stamps should have been a lesson. Instead, I’ve continued to follow the same pattern over the years, thinking to myself, “If I put this here, I’ll be sure to remember it,” then forgetting almost instantly.
It happened again last month.
I’d agreed to do a service club program and knew just what I’d talk about.
The plan was to recycle a speech I’d given to the Jay County Historical Society several years ago at the society’s annual meeting.
The speech was called, “The Slow Boy,” and it was a recounting of a speech originally delivered by my grandfather, Edward Haynes, about 80 years ago to the Portland Rotary Club. The topic was Elwood Haynes, the automotive pioneer and metallurgist, who had died in Kokomo. Edward was the youngest brother of Elwood and had a special fondness for him.
The speech was so well-received that Edward Haynes also delivered it before the Rotary Club of Kokomo that same year.
In the various boxes and files that constitute a sort of informal family archive, I had found a rare treat: Not only the original notes for “The Slow Boy” speech but also newspaper accounts from Portland and Kokomo about the speech.
On top of that, my grandfather on my father’s side, the Rev. Hugh N. Ronald Sr., had been a guest at Rotary in Portland the night the speech was made. He’d been so taken by it that he wrote a detailed letter to his sons about young Elwood Haynes. And the letter was in the archives as well.
What I did for the historical society speech was reconstruct the event as best I could, moving from the original notes to the two newspaper accounts to Grandfather Ronald’s letter. It was pretty cool and received a good response from the historical society. Rob Weaver actually videotaped the whole thing for posterity.
So last month, the idea was this: Recycle the reconstructed “Slow Boy” speech as a program for the Portland Rotary Club.
I knew I had all the materials because I was looking at the file just before the holidays.
I remember thinking that I wanted to make sure the file was preserved and that the whole thing should be turned over to the historical society one of these days. So I put it somewhere safe.
In other words, I hid it from myself.
There’s no doubt it’s in the house somewhere, probably within a few feet of where I sit while writing this column. But can I put my hands on it right now when I need it? Of course not.
All I know for sure is, I didn’t put it with those stamps I hid back when I was 12.[[In-content Ad]]