I found my knife!

  Honestly, who really cares if I found my knife? People lose and find knives every day, probably by the thousands. Shoot, just go on eBay right now and do a search for TSA confiscated knives. You can literally buy them by the box load. For me, one particular knife changed my life and holds me to a commitment.

  The knife in question? It's a Case Trapper knife, in smooth chestnut bone. Right now it retails for about seventy five bucks, but when I bought it they sold for fifty or so. I'd spent a lot of time researching knives, reading reviews, trying different knives to see what type, size and style would fit my needs best. I know, I know, it seems like a lot of work, but I bet a lot of you have done the same sort of thing looking for just the right...whatever it is you love. When the knife finally arrived, it was absolutely perfect (for me) and it became as regular a companion to me as my cell phone, wedding ring (OK, that's an exaggeration), and my general sense of angst and self-doubt. 

  Until I lost it. Well...misplaced it. 

  On February fourteenth, 2021, I was in my backyard working on a wood project. My wife and I weren't getting along very well at the time. Looking back, we were much closer to ending the marriage than we realized at the time. We were having Valentine's Day dinner with some family, like a double-date couples kind of thing with my wife's brother and his wife. I'd had a few glasses of wine and was bored with the conversation so went outside to work on a project for my daughter. 

  Did you catch that? A couple glasses of wine and woodworking? 

  In case you don't know what a router table is, it's a flat table with a remarkably sharp blade spinning at mind-boggling speeds. Normally, if you know what you're doing, pay attention and respect the machine, and strictly avoid alcohol, it's common to use router tables for years and years without incident. I didn't do any of those things and managed to jam the middle two fingers of my right hand into the spinning blade. Because the blade is designed to quickly remove large chunks of hardwood very quickly, it devoured a goodly chunk of my skin, flesh, and bone without complaint. It was like the router bladed didn't even know I touched it. 

  But I knew. I very quickly felt as if my hand was in a perpetual state of being slammed by a very large hammer. 

  As blood speckled a pattern across my patio, I gently tapped the window of the back porch to ask my wife for help. She is prone to high anxiety so when she came to the window, I said, "Hey babe, I think I might have hurt myself." She saw how pale my face was and the gathering puddle of blood next to my foot and immediately ran away, screaming to her brother, "Pat! Pat! Shawn cut his hand off!" 

  Of course, I hadn't, but in her mind, all woodworking injuries cause missing limbs. 

  Pat took me to the local urgent care clinic where they determined that I had exposed bone and needed to go to a proper trauma center. He couldn't stay with me the rest of the evening and so my father-in-law drove me to Cooper Medical in Camden, New Jersey where they had trauma doctors on staff. 

  In case you're wondering, this is where I get back to the knife. 

  In Camden, as you might imagine, they have tight security at the hospital. Each patient has to go through a metal detector and leave anything that could be dangerous at the door with the guards. Naturally, I left my knife with them, but events unfolded so quickly and my head was so spinning with pain that I didn't remember seeing it after that. 

  The doctor on call that night did an excellent job stitching, gluing, and bandaging my fingers back together. In fact, it takes a very close inspection of my hand to even see any of the damage. So, good job, a doctor at Cooper whose name I've forgotten! You're a rock star!

  The next day, with a clearer head, I went through my morning routine and reached the spot where I always keep my knife, and it wasn't there. I looked in the usual places where I often leave it, but it wasn't there either. Over the following weeks, I called back to the security desk at Cooper, but they didn't have it; I looked in my brother-in-law's car, but it wasn't there, nor in my father-in-law's car. For months I ransacked my home, looking in places that I knew were almost impossible for it to be, and found nothing, nothing, an old pair of my favorite socks I'd misplaced, nothing, a rare penny, and more nothing. 

  During that same period, things had gone from uncomfortable to miserable in my marriage. My wife and I simply weren't communicating well and were on our way toward fully resenting each other.