I Don't Need A Gun. I Just Want My Pocketknife Back

Dang it! I’ve lost my pocketknife. Again!

This is what my lost pocketknife looks like

I had managed to keep the most recent one almost two years, but here I am back to my old habit of losing my trusty blade. I don’t have a clue where or how I lost it either. It’s about a three-inch metal job with a serrated blade. It either jumped out of my pocket when I wasn’t looking, I left it someplace and don’t remember where or it fell out of my pocket when I was changing my pants and is hiding from me. I looked under the bed but it wasn’t there. I checked every pocket of every pair of pants in my closet (then had to straighten them up on their hangars again). I looked on my worktable in the garage and on the kitchen counter under the mail and coupons and magazines and all that other unnecessary clutter. I looked in the truck. No bueno. The knife appears to be gone. Maybe someday I’ll find it wherever I lost my church tithe. Maybe I’ll come across a whole rat hole’s worth of stuff I’ve lost. I keep finding loose pocket change between the cushions of the couch. Miracles can happen.

I never used to carry a pocketknife; not until about ten years ago. Then I finally realized how handy they can be. Now I use mine for everything from opening letters to scraping glue or dirt off things, for cutting plastic or wood and stuff like that, for prying something loose (I do a lot of that) or I use it as a screwdriver or other tool.

My mother didn’t want me to have a knife when I was younger. I don’t know why she thought I’d hurt myself although I did cut my hand pretty severely once when my family went camping and my dad gave me his knife to cut willow sticks to use as weenie roasters. My dad warned me, “Don’t cut towards your body, cut away.” But of course I did exactly what he told me not to and sliced my hand pretty badly.

I’ve often wondered with squeamish horror what it would feel like to be bayoneted or to have my throat slit with a knife.

I don’t keep my knife blade very sharp for the reason that I do seem to cut myself a mite too easily. Anyway, I have learned - because I keep losing knives - to buy small cheap ones in quantity so they aren’t big enough to do me much harm and so that when I lose one I have a replacement. I’ve got spare knives in my sock drawer, my desk drawer, in the truck center console. I’m prepared to lose a knife I just don’t like doing it.

When I first started carrying a knife I had a couple of them confiscated at airports so I finally got it into my head to take my knife out of my pocket and leave it at home. Of course then, I would often forget where I left it.

I guess you’ve gotten my point (LoL) by now. Fortunately, even though I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, I can still cut the mustard. Sam’s looking at me as if to say, “I can’t believe you said that.”