WHAT’S SO FUNNY: The usual suspect

Victory is mine, I win, I rock, I rule, I am the king, I am the champion.

For years now I have had occasion, on occasion, to speculate that someone in the house has moved or taken something of mine.

Socks, a book, keys, my watch, a DVD or CD, a snack, the clicker, the scissors, the tape.

You may know the feeling. An item of yours is missing, and you certainly didn’t move it, so someone else must have.

Over the years a lot of items have disappeared on me, and after a brief search I’ve always concluded they were taken by a family member.

In all those years, not once have I been right.

“My paperweight of Santa Anita racetrack dirt isn’t where I left it.”

“Yeah, somebody must have taken it.”

That would be my wife, Patti Jo, on the reply. A hint of sarcasm — as if she wouldn’t want it. And after awhile I’d find the paperweight on my desk, under my jury duty notice.

Twenty years of that can undermine your confidence.

Could it actually be that nobody is taking your stuff? Could it be that you just can’t keep track?

Then two weeks ago we were in Palm Springs in a hotel room and I came out of the shower on checkout morning to discover that my toothbrush wasn’t on the bathroom counter.

I looked under the washcloths and Kleenex twice without saying a word. I looked on the floor, and in my toiletry bag.

I couldn’t figure it out. It was there last night. I wouldn’t have taken it into another room. Would I?

If you take your toothbrush into a room in which it has no function, that’s bad. That’s a sign of decline.

I noticed Patti Jo’s toothbrush was still on the counter, and as a last desperate roll of the dice I opened the lid on her toiletry kit. And there was my toothbrush, which she’d inadvertently put away instead of her own.

Finally.

She couldn’t understand what I was so happy about. To her it was a non-incident — hardly something to go on about for the rest of the day.

But I was right and she had moved it, just as I’ve said all along about everything else. I’m retroactively justified. If it happened once it could have happened all those other times.

And it afforded me a rare opportunity to utter that line common to all long-standing marriages:

“NOW who’s crazy?”

SHERWOOD KIRALY is a Laguna Beach resident. He has written four novels, three of which were critically acclaimed.