A Loss : Day 2 of My 30 day challenge

Tell about a character who lost something important to him/her.

 My name is Rick. I run the counter at a tourist stop. People come here to see the "Largest Buffalo in the World!" Which is really just a glorified pinata made of cement and chicken wire. A feat of engineering, yes, but the real reason everyone stops here is we have the only gas station for the next 200 miles.

The offseason is the worst. I sometimes go two to three weeks without seeing a single person. It's a job though and will pay for me to fix my 1989 Ford and get out and away to college.

With all this time on my hands, you'd think I'd have an avid following on twitter or facebook. Social media would be an excellent time waster for a dull job like mine. However, the Wifi out here is the equivalent of a dial-up connection. Even my laptop hums like a dinosaur Windows 98 trying to load one or two pictures on a page.

The lost-and-found bin, that's where the real action is. After a good long summer of tourists trekking across the continental USA, it fills to the brim with odds and ends left in the parking lot, the picnic benches, and most often the bathrooms. It becomes a shrine to the weirdness of humanity. Nothing left here ever gets claimed again. The people who stop are here to get gas, take a picture and empty their ash trays.  If it gets left, it's gone for good. Many a pacifier has disappeared into the void that is the bin. Shoes, bottles, jackets that go back to the 70's I'm sure. Sometimes I'm sure it is collecting things on its own. More than once I've had to retrieve my sunglasses and ear buds from its ever growing mass.  

Every once in a while something really cool will find it's way in and you start to wonder how long you're supposed to let it sit before it's ok to pocket it. It's not like they're coming back. In a way, it's like going on a cross-country trip of my own. I've collected a pack of cards from Vegas, Sunglasses from Hawaii (at least the rims say luau on them), and numerous key chains from various states, (how do you forget your keys? I mean really?).

The dashboard of my '89 has become a running showcase for my finds. Most of them I feel no remorse for adopting. The one that I continually come back to is a book I collected two summers ago. Granted, no one has ever come looking for it. I think that last time someone asked to see look in the lost and found was the early 90's. The book is some kind of a self-help "Chicken soup for the Teenager who You Can't Connect With" fluff, but that's not why I picked it up. It got left in the women's room and I picked it up after hours while mopping. I was flipping through it before tossing it in the bin just to have a laugh at the cliche chapter headings and cheesy cover art when a ring fell from its pages. I expected it to be a cheap drug store ring but the diamonds in the gold band had me questioning that.

I wondered for a long time what I should do with the thing. Chances are whoever's it was had removed their ring to wash their hands and had left it in the book on the bathroom counter on accident. I kept the book and the ring with me every day that summer, scared that the void of the bin would swallow it. I asked everyone I who came in if they had lost a ring. It never led anywhere. When summer ended it had been three months. I let it sit between the pages of that cheesy book on my dash that whole first year. But I lost all hope that whoever she was would come back for it.

I think about getting it appraised to see if it's worth anything, but I worry that with the mystery gone will ruin it for me. She could have been newly engaged and terribly sad that she lost it, or maybe she was a rich philanthropist leaving her jewels for the poor tourist stop staff to find it. More likely it's just costume jewelry that some twelve-year-old forgot but it's become my favorite part of my collection. After that first year, I decided to cut a compartment into the book to house the ring. It seemed right since that was where I found it. This will be my last summer working this tourist stop and I'm hoping to take a trip cross-country and see some of the places that I've gotten a taste of in my collecting. Maybe I'll take the ring along and take pictures of it around all the places I go. I've grown attached to the idea that someday I'll give it to the girl I want to marry. Whoever she is will deserve a ring with history and a special pizazz.

Here's to my future adventures and the new lost finds this summer will bring.