"NOW YOU SEE IT..."

“And when she hath found it, she calleth her friends and her neighbours together, saying, Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost.” (Luke 15:9)

There are SO many passages of Scripture I could have used to open this post! I came very close to using one of those about saying you can see but are blind (such as from John 9) or about walking by faith not by sight; but I settled on the passage from Luke 15 which is about that which is lost being found.

I’ve got a transistor radio which belonged to my parents. Now, I had several very cheap, plastic transistor radios in the 1960s, but my parents’ transistor radio was higher quality than that. My father bought it around 1964. I think he actually had to ORDER it...that it was advertised in a Sunday newspaper supplement...something like that. It’s SMALL. You can easily hold it in your hand. Being from 1964, it gets ONLY AM radio stations. There used to be an earpiece for it, but I don’t know what became of it. Unlike the transistor radios I always used, this one does not take a 9 volt battery but rather 2 AA batteries. As I recall, AA batteries in the 1960s were much less common than they are today. When my sister and I were in the process of going through my parents’ things, the old transistor radio was something I wanted.

Granted there is not a whole lot on AM radio anymore. Pretty much I flip between WRKO, WBZ and WPRV (Providence, RI “Business Radio"), and I usually listen to the little radio when I’m shaving in the morning. On Monday, I was outside doing some light yard work and I brought the transistor radio along. I then went inside to do a few things and was carrying the radio around from room to room with me. A phone call came in which I took. I then went to pick up the radio and turn it on, and I could not find it.

At first, I didn’t think it was a big deal, but I walked from room to room looking around and I just could not find it! That’s something that can “drive me crazy”: having an object. laying it down for a moment, and then having it “disappear”. My father hated having that sort of thing happen, too. He sometimes had a funny way of enunciating and pronouncing things...a combination of a Boston accent and a very slight Quebec French accent. He’d get mad and say the lost object pulled a “disappearing ACK!!!” (“ack” meant “act” but that’s how he pronounced it!). Well, that vintage 1964 transistor radio “pulled a disappearing ack!”

I walked from the bedroom, to the bathroom, to the dining room, to the kitchen, almost like a lion pacing around in its cage. I did that on Monday for what seemed like forever. Finally, I just gave up. I did mention to my son Jon that I’d lost the radio. He went to the same rooms, looking under furniture, looking on countertops, looking all over the place. He wondered if I accidentally threw it in the trash, and I wondered that, too. I even looked in the refrigerator and the freezer! No radio.

I looked around for a few minutes on Tuesday and Wednesday, also, and NOTHING. Yesterday, Jon gave the house a good, thorough final check for the radio: nothing. In the late afternoon, I was putting something on top of my bedroom dresser and suddenly I noticed that there on top of the dresser, toward the back of it, was the transistor radio!

Here’s the amazing thing: My eyes scanned that room and dresser top several times, as did Jon’s, and WE NEVER SAW THE TRANSISTOR RADIO. I guess we just mentally did not expect it to be there and we did not SEE it! I watched a special on ABC a few weeks ago about the unreality of “eyewitness” testimony and that it’s amazing what your brain will block out. One exercise was done where a bunch of people are on a stage dancing, and a guy keeps changing dancing partners. The audience is told to watch carefully and see how many dancing partners he has over one minute. I did that. Afterwards, the host asked if anybody saw a man walk onto the stage and do a bunch of crazy things while the dance was going on. A FEW people in the audience DID see the man. MOST did not. I had not seen the man at all. Then the clip was rerun. Indeed, during the dance a man DOES walk onto the stage and do a bunch of crazy things. When you’re watching the other guy dancing around and changing dance partners, you don’t notice or even SEE the guy doing crazy things!

On my telephone answering service job, one of my coworkers got in trouble recently for not following procedure that this particular client wanted. The issue was that the proper procedure was “spelled out on the computer screen” for that account, and she ignored it. It’s a challenge when we take calls at the answering service...sometimes you take one after another. When the call comes on, the client’s info. comes up on your computer screen. But there’s usually a LOT of stuff on the screen. You’re trying to listen to the caller, take the information, and glance at the screen. My coworker did not see the specific instructions. Later, I “brought up” that account on my own screen to see if I’d have noticed the special instructions. In fact, they were right there on the screen, but along with so much other stuff, I knew that if I’d have taken that SAME call, I would have not “seen” what was on the screen and I would have made the same mistake. Well, NOW that it’s happened, if I take a similar call on that account, I will know what to do, but this whole thing of having something right in front of you, but NOT seeing it... it’s a strange and mysterious phenomenon; don’t you SEE??