The Lost Overcoat...

Nothing significant really. I went out last night with a group of friends to some bar/lounge. The place didn't have a coat check, and most people had left their coats in a pile on one of the couches. I added mine to the pile and went on with my night. The night ended and when I went to retrieve it from the pile.. ALAS... IT WAS GONE! I searched frantically with the help of my friends to no avail, but miraculously (at least to me) one of my friends was handed by some mysterious person they most valuable thing that was in my coat, my keys. I left the place with the one coat that was lying on the couch after all the others had gone; it looked very similar to mine, and had I been more drunk I might have walked out with it by mistake. I'm sure this has happened to many others; in fact, I know so. What could be more common than trying to stumble out at the end of the night and picking the wrong black overcoat out of fifteen other similar black overcoats. I called the place today to see if anyone has called about their coat. The girl on the other end said that no one had, but that their lost and found had many coats and that I should check. Well, I figured, its just a coat, and besides, (again, I still can't believe how) I got my keys.

That's the end of it right? I mean, what can I really do? I'll go check the lost and found, but what are the chances of it being there? For all intents and purposes the coat is gone. It wasn't super expensive or anything either. I can probably replace it with $100 to $150. No small sum, but nothing insurmountable or crippling. Replacing all the keys would have been much worse. Or on a really unlucky day I would have had my wallet and cell phone in there too. So yeah it sucks.. now I'm going to have to spend a hundred bucks on something that I already had, but honestly I've had the coat for 4 years or something, and it was getting time to replace it anyway. I mean the buttons kept falling off, and it was too "college-ey." So that's the end of it.. right? right? Why the hell would I write a post about it? Cause I have nothing else in my insignificant life to write about? Maybe, but if I can be existentialist about it, is there anything really significant? But lets not go there, and I ask you to give me the benefit of the doubt that that's not it. Cause I just want to annoy you? That could be it too, but again lets assume I have better things to do. So then why?

Because I miss it. Isn't that stupid; it was just a coat! But I miss it nonetheless. Its funny how human beings get attached to objects. They come to have "sentimental" value. Not coincidentally, I couldn't help thinking of Nikolai Gogol's famous short story titled The Overcoat.
In my mind, this coat was is associated with a very particular part of my life. I got it during the winter of my first year of college, and now I've lost it during the first year of life after college. It has been there for so many "important" events in my life. The person that bought it was very different than the person that lost it. I guess the college period is like that for everybody: you change.. a lot!

If I look through some pictures from college, I can point it out in hundreds. I didn't really like it initially. It was the quintessential coat that everybody at my college had. The standard woolen black pea-coat. The "now I'm in college, and I want to look sophisticated" coat. The "my ski jacked just isn't gonna cut it now that I'm an young adult" coat. Maybe it was just me. I called it my "fag jacket." [yes, I realize this is politically incorrect, but what in college was really politically correct? Rest assured that no offense is intended] I wore it when I needed to look preppy. As college wore on, I tended to wear it more and more. Then, when I started working, well, it was pretty much the standard look, so I wore it pretty regularly. I didn't realize that I had become so attached to it.

The Lost Overcoat

Ok so I'm exaggerating a bit too much here! I'm not like curled up in a ball crying about it or anything. I am just surprised how much it had meant to me. I'm sure I'll get a new one and forget all about this old one, but I wonder what other objects in my life I have a similar attachment to?... Anyway, I thought that if I said a proper goodbye to the coat in the form of this blog, it would make me feel better. Now that I've done that; I do feel better. The coat will be missed, but life will go on. Besides its not really gone. Some random person is probably wearing it right now, and I guess its just as well that it be passed on. Maybe they'll be writing about it to when sometime down the road they lose it to somebody else.