In preparation for my annual Canadian fishing trip, I needed to organize my fishing gear. I went into my garage to inventory my current supply of lures and jigs, only to discover that my tackle box was gone. I hadn’t used it or seen it since last October, and now it was missing.
After rummaging through the garage several times and contacting friends to ask if I’d left a tackle box in one of their boats, I concluded that one of two things had happened. Either someone had stolen my tackle box out of my garage or, more likely, I’d gone fishing last fall and, after strapping my kayak to the roof of my car, drove away with my tackle box still sitting at the side of the road.
Regardless of how my tackle box had disappeared, I now had to replace it and its contents. My first step was to pull out the backup tackle box I kept stashed in the very back of my garage. This box was storage for the lures I no longer used. Most of them were outdated or damaged, some just had rusty hooks. My hope was that, among the junk, I could salvage a few spoons and spinners to start me on my resupply.
When I opened the backup tackle box, I was surprised to discover that it was fully stocked. In fact, it contained everything I thought was missing. Apparently my good tackle box had been neither stolen nor abandoned. Instead I must have broken it (probably snapped off the flimsy latch), moved all of my lures from the broken tackle box into the backup, threw the broken tackle box away, and then forgot everything I had done!
I have come to accept that my short-term memory is not what it once was. Now I must grapple with the fact that my long-term memory is unreliable, too. Maybe this is why I bother to keep a blog at all. Like the guy in the movie Memento, I write down the things I am bound to forget.
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