scavenger hunt

I generally consider myself an organized and responsible person. This weekend, though, I was a person who had three expired insurance cards in her glovebox, but not the current one...necessitating two extra trips from garage to home, twenty minutes of rifling through the aforementioned glovebox, a phone call to the insurance company, and the general testing of Drew's patience.

There was one scene that basically summed up the experience:
me: (rifling through pile of papers in the glovebox) "Oh--maybe this is it!" (pulls out insurance card with hopeful enthusiasm)
drew: "Did you find it?"
me: "Oh, no...this one is from 2006." (I start to put the paper back in the pile)
drew: (through slightly clenched teeth, but still lovingly) "Don't put that back in there...throw it away."

Alls well that ends well--my inspection is up to date and we are still happily married. It's just that I don't think of myself as a flighty, disorganized kind of person, you know? But in the context above, it's sort of hard to argue with that label.

Here's the thing...also in that glovebox: sweet note my mom sent me three years ago saying she was proud of the woman I'd become, book of matches from the "Hot Spot" in SC, where Sarah and I stopped and bought flip flops at midnight on our way home after being stranded in Atlanta for four hours with a flat tire, shiny lip gloss from when I visited Dublin in NYC two years ago, 35mm camera I got to take with me on my drive to California for my senior year of college with roll of undeveloped film still in it. And countless other random momenta (or detritus, if you're an unsentimental type).

A certain level of chaos in my life is what leaves me receptive to moments of magic and unexpected memory. If I always knew exactly what was going to be in a folder or a box when I opened it, I'd only remember certain things on purpose, when I decided to.

Not that any of this justifies the insurance card fiasco...there's nothing magical about finding an insurance card from 2006. He was right about throwing that away.

There is a theory that people will unconsciously leave things in places they want to return to. Perhaps my resistance to organized filing really a manifestation of my relationship to memory and an attempt to rebel against the pressure to live life as a linear narrative. Seems like the most likely explanation, right?