I lost a ham today.
I know that’s not the kind of confession you expect to hear every day, but there it is:
Today, I lost a ham.
“How does someone lose a ham?” my friend Anne asked when I told her.
“Well, if I knew the answer to that, I’d be able to un-lose it,” I said, so I tried to recreate the day’s stunning mystery as well as I could.
I went to the grocery store to pick up a few staples I was running low on — bananas, sour cream, grapes, juice, chips — and when I passed through the meat section a nice ham caught my eye. I don’t eat ham all that much, but sometimes there’s nothing better than a ham-and-Swiss on rye, with stone-ground mustard, maybe some lettuce, and a spear of one of my homemade garlic dill pickles on the side. Besides, I had just finished the last of my homemade turkey-rice soup, frozen since Thanksgiving, and a big pot of ham-and-pea soup was starting to sound pretty good.
So I put the ham in my cart, swung down the aisle to pick up a bag of dried split peas, and rolled up to the self-checkout aisle.
But when I got home and put everything away, I walked out of the kitchen and screeched to a stop. “Wait. I don’t remember putting the ham away.”
I opened the fridge, and sure enough, no ham. I dashed out to the car to check there. I had carried the grocery bags home in the back seat — had the ham rolled out of one of the bags onto the floor? Nope. No ham.
I went back to the fridge to check again. Had I put it in the produce drawer? Nope, not there. I didn’t put it in the freezer, did I? Nope, no ham.
I went back to the car and checked the back seat area again, and then, out of desperation, the front seat. It would be an odd place to put a ham with all the other groceries in the back seat, but hey, it can get lonely driving back home from the grocery store with nobody to talk to. No ham.
I even checked under the car, in case the ham had found a way to squeeze through a seam at the bottom of the plastic bag and rolled under there. Nope. No pig parts under the car, which under almost any other circumstance would have been good news.
So, considering my options, I guessed that I might have left it at the store, the fourth bag of groceries that never made it home with the other three. Or maybe I left it in the cart when I hefted the others into the back seat and wheeled the cart to the cart rack, stubbornly refusing to look down.
I called customer service at the grocery store and asked if maybe somebody might have brought a lost ham to their desk in search of its owner, but nope, no orphaned hams had been brought to them.
“So that,” I said to my friend Anne, “is how you lose a ham, I guess.”
She nodded with a knowing look on her face. “Did you check the top of the fridge?”
John, her husband, said: “Oh, Lord.”
They told the story of how Anne had returned from the grocery store with bags and bags of groceries, and with countertops filling as she sorted them out, she plunked a Cornish hen on top of the fridge. Just for a minute or so.
A minute that turned into a few days.
And then a few weeks.
“Where is that smell coming from?” they both said.
Eventually, when the maggots hatched, the flies led them to the lost hen, which they agreed no amount of seasoning could save.
“Nope, not on the fridge,” I said, though I knew I would check again.
And having exhausted every reasonable path to finding my lost ham, I grudgingly gave in to an even grimmer thought, and I embarked on a search of unreasonable places where a codger might have plunked a vagabond ham. After all, when you reach a certain age, you have to acknowledge that people at a certain age can misplace things in some pretty bizarre places.
Maybe the closet, where I took off my shoes when I came home from the grocery store?
Next to the TV remote on the end table next to the recliner?
On my desk in my office, where I write the kind of crap you’re reading right now?
Nope. No ham. Which, I guess, is the good news. Because if I had found a ham in any of those places, I’m not sure I would trust myself to make a big pot of soup out of the ham joint — and then spend days wondering where the cat went.
So the best I can hope for is that the next guy in line at the grocery store self-checkout aisle went home with a free ham. Good for him. He may have been having a bad day, and maybe a free ham could be just the thing to raise his spirits a bit. If so, and if he’s reading this right now, I hope he shoots me an email so I can send him those dried split peas that are just sitting around waiting to get into the game. Either that, or send me the bone when he’s done with those tasty ham-and-Swiss on ryes.
I hope that’s how this story ends. Because I’d hate to think you might walk past me someday and wonder why my fresh-from-the-dryer shirt smells just a bit like hickory smoke with a honey-glazed look to it.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
