Sep 17, 2021 3 min read

Grace was worried about me.

Somewhere on a college campus in West Virginia, my daughter was splitting her emotional energy between the next day’s psychology test and my well-being.

My Grace had just received a call from a grocery store pharmacist, a cold call that rattled her nerves.

“Do you know a Beth Dolinar?”

It was probably the “a” in that question that felt like trouble.

“She’s my mother,” Grace said.

The pharmacist had my cellphone and, hoping to find its owner, had dialed the first number on my contacts.

And Grace answered.

And while that was playing out in the space between my phone and hers, I was stuck in a panic back at home, searching everywhere for a phone gone awry!

I generally eschew exclamation points, but the panic and urgency of this drama calls for an exception to my rule.

Few things are as disorienting as losing a cellphone, because they are the vectors that connect us to everything. I still can recite the home phone numbers of most of my childhood friends and some relatives. Except for the numbers belonging to my children and my parents, however, I now don’t know the contact information for anyone else.

My phone keeps track of all that.

Losing my phone last weekend came at the worst possible time. I was leaving for a work trip the next morning, for several days of filming on the GAP trail. All my interview contacts were on the phone. Attempting that assignment without my phone would feel like that dream I often had about being on camera for a newscast with wet hair, no makeup and no script.

Without the phone, I’m a mess.

It was already late at night when I realized I’d misplaced the phone. I’d come home from grocery shopping and noticed the phone wasn’t in my purse. I returned to my car for a look. Maybe it had fallen between the seats. A flashlight would have helped, but I couldn’t find one of those, either.

“I know, I’ll call the phone,” I told myself.

But I live alone, and don’t have a landline. I drove to my neighbor’s house and startled her by ringing the doorbell.

She dialed my number.

Silence.

This required a return to the store, a trip made longer and more frantic by the little-man-in-a-hat driving at ice cream-truck speed in front of me the whole way! As I followed, I leaned forward, as if to will Mr. Pokey along. In another 10 minutes, the store would close!

I checked the parking lot, and the cart I’d left in the corral. Went inside and asked the woman at the checkout line. Nothing. And then I remembered that I’d stopped at the pharmacy to see if my allergy medicine was ready.

Running now, I went to the counter as the gate was about to close.

“Did you find……”

Before I could finish my question, a woman in a lab coat walked toward me with her arm extended. In her hand was my phone.

“I called your daughter,” she said. “She said she’s in college in West Virginia. She’s worried about you.”

I thanked my pharmacist-angel about 30 times, and heaved a big sigh of relief. Back in the car, I called Grace.

“I tried to tell you they had your phone,” she said.

When I got home, there was an email message from her.

“Mom!!!,” she wrote, “You left your phone at the drug store!!!”

Six exclamation points! And I’d earned them all.