Sally Breslin: My Life: POKEMON IS TO BLAME FOR MY LACK OF SLEEP

For some reason, I have spent most of my time lately searching for things I’ve managed to misplace. The most common one is my glasses, mainly because I have to be wearing them to see clearly enough to find them, otherwise I have to feel around the house for them.

But I blame the evening news for my lack of sleep this week. When the anchors were saying how Pokemon cards have made a comeback during the pandemic and now are worth a small fortune, I happened to remember a box of assorted junk I’d bought at an auction about 25 years ago. The box contained everything from model NASCAR vehicles and wrestling action-figures to a magazine about Ricky Nelson.

It also contained a sandwich bag filled with Pokemon cards.

And so the search began. No stone was left unturned – closets, storage containers, underneath my bed, underneath the dogs’ beds and deep into the bowels of the basement. Finally, at about 3:00 AM Sunday morning, I found the aforementioned box buried underneath two huge rolls of bubble wrap in the back of my office closet.

The Pokemon cards still looked fresh and crisp. The problem was, they were written entirely in Japanese, so where the name of the character pictured on the card was written underneath it, I couldn’t tell if it was Pikachu or one of the Muppets. One of the few things in English on all of the cards, however, was the copyright, 1996. So I searched online to see if any of the cards might be valuable.

One of the cards looked different from the others. It had a red bird on it that became multi-colored when the light hit it. I checked it out and discovered, to my delight, it was a rare Ho-Oh hologram card worth anywhere from $60 to $120, depending on the condition. Not a bad profit, I thought, for a $5 box of auction junk. So I listed it on Ebay and now I’m eagerly awaiting to see how many bids it receives. I’ll consider anything over $5 to be a personal victory.

Anyway, during my countless hours searching for that box, I recalled how my husband used to tease me about misplacing things. Whenever I’d misplace my glasses, for example, he’d suggest that I get a chain for them so I could wear them around my neck.

“No way,” I’d always say. “One of those chains would add an instant 20 years to my appearance.”

“Well,” he’d try to reason with me, “it’s better than having to spend $350 to replace your glasses when you accidentally leave them on the sofa and sit on them.”

My husband seemed to take pleasure in teasing me about losing things. So one time, when he lost something and was all stressed out because he couldn’t find it, I jumped at the opportunity to make it my life’s goal to never let him live it down.

It all began one morning when he crawled out of bed and startled me awake with, “Where the heck is my slipper!”

I got up and walked over to his side of the bed. One lonely slipper sat on the floor.

Well, because he had bad knees, I was elected to get down on mine and stick my head underneath the bed to search for his slipper. I found dust bunnies, a brown loafer and one black sock covered with the aforementioned dust bunnies, but no slipper.

“Where was it when you last saw it?” I asked him.

“On my foot!”

“Are you sure you had both slippers on your feet when you came to bed?”

“Of course I did! I think I would have noticed that one slipper was missing when I walked down the hallway to bed!” he answered. “I mean, I was tired, but not sleepwalking!”

I retrieved a flashlight and searched the entire bedroom. There was no sign of the elusive slipper. I did find, however, an earring I’d been searching for since 1989.

“This is too weird,” my husband said. “Something supernatural must have happened to it. Slippers don’t just disappear like that while you’re sleeping!”

Somehow, I couldn’t imagine the slipper trotting off by itself, or a ghost haunting our bedroom for the sole purpose of stealing a ratty old slipper. And our dogs were not slipper chewers, nor did they have any interest in them, so there was no sense frisking them for evidence or checking to see if their breaths smelled like feet.

“I love those slippers,” my husband’s voice sounded very close to a whine an hour later as he sat sulking in his recliner. “They’re warm and comfortable. I still can’t believe that from the time I took them off and got into bed until the time I got up, one of them just disappeared into thin air. It makes no sense!”

My eyebrows rose at his statement. Suddenly, everything did make perfect sense to me. I headed back to the bedroom and yanked down the blankets. There, lying on top of the sheet at the foot of the bed, was his precious slipper

“You went to bed wearing a slipper?” I asked in disbelief as I handed it to him. “I found it in the bed, underneath the blankets!”

He looked puzzled. “I could have sworn I’d taken both of them off.”

A vision of him wearing only his undershorts and one slipper as he climbed into bed, made me burst out laughing.

He wasn’t amused. He shook his head and frowned. “You really found this in the bed? You wouldn’t just be pulling my leg, would you?”

“No, I really found it in the bed.”

Funny, but after that, he never teased me about losing things again.

But I’m pretty sure I’ve outdone his vanishing-slipper mystery many times since then. Like the time I couldn’t find one of my pink foam hair-curlers…until a woman in line behind me at Walmart pointed out that I had a curler in the back of my hair.

I’m sure my husband (rest his soul) would have had a real field day with that one.

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines for most of her adult life. She is the author of several novels, including: “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor” and “Inside the Blue Cube.” Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.