Where is my Lamp?

This happened some time ago, but it bears telling.

One day last year I noticed that the box on the shelf in the garage was empty. It used to contain two little jug-style lamps that were my mother's. The box still said "Lamps" on it, but they were gone. Who would do that? Would my wife throw them out????

I took the lamps from my mother's house after she died a few years ago. She had bought the inexpensive lamps after my father died in 1971. With insurance money she redecorated and bought new furniture and carpet. The lamps had stayed in the living room as we all grew up over the past 30 years. I couldn't really use the furniture so I took the lamps. Their only value was sentimental.

Now, my wife likes to throw things out, but this would be a little extreme. The lamps had been put away on a shelf in the garage and really shouldn't have been a bother to her.

So I asked her. Did you see them? Do you know where they are? Could they be in the attic? Did I possibly move them and then forget?

She insisted she hadn't seen them and then got angry when I asked some more. I couldn't figure it out. There had to be an answer. Certainly this wouldn't be one of those unending mysteries like How did Bush win the election?

She denied more and told me to Stop Accusing Her, which I hadn't, yet.

I let her go and thought about it. I figured they HAD to have been there. And if she didn't trash them, they had to be somewhere in the house. I made a Wanted poster of the lamp and posted it. I called her mother and asked if just maybe we had given the lamps to her the last time she visited. Nope.

Then.... I inappropriately listened in on my wife's conversation with her mother. She called her mother to say that I was obviously off the deep end with this lamp thing. Yes, her mother said, he called me about it. "Did you throw them out?" her mother asked.

"You know I did," my wife said. And then went on to say how crazy I was.

Wow. She had gotten up on a ladder, grabbed the box, emptied out the lamps, and put the box back, knowing that they were my mother's. And then, with NO guilt whatsoever, insisted that she never touched them. Amazing. Could she really be this cold to her husband's feelings?

And what is even more stunning is that, in a conversation with her mother, NEITHER one of them says, "well maybe that was a mistake to toss them." Neither one of them has any sense of morals or scruples that would make them pause for a second and consider the offense. After all, it's not like it was something of value to either of THEM.

I'm sorry to lose the lamps. They reminded me of something special. But to know that my wife is that cold and capable of that kind of dishonesty is much more of a shock.

I was so angry about it all that I went to the basement and found her collection of old letters from one of her previous husbands and from her parents. I took half of them and threw them out in the trash can.

An hour later and dug them out and put them back. I couldn't do it. Trashing someone's personal memories and souvenirs is unforgivable. And so I didn't and I haven't.