The Case of the Missing Peanut Butter

Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.

Where we are: Last Friday, a couple of hours after my email went out, we took the train to the Helsinki airport, and GOT OUR LUGGAGE BACK. It felt like a small miracle.

Now we’re in Tallinn, Estonia, with Lee’s mom. And everything we own.

The Case of the Missing Peanut Butter

In all our travels, Lee and I have never had anything disappear from a hotel room (okay, a teaspoon once, in Iceland, but that was understandable—it looked like a hotel teaspoon). We don’t take a lot of safety precautions; we just trust.

We’ve heard of people who worry about hotel housekeeping staff stealing their valuables; they cram their computers in the safe, or decline housekeeping altogether. We’ve met people who carry their passports under their clothes, all day, every day. Guh—I overheat just from normal clothes. The last thing I need is some kind of Kevlar bra.

Maybe I don’t have anything worth stealing, but I don’t worry about things disappearing from my hotel room.

If there’s a safe in the room, we use it for our passports, spare credit cards, and emergency cash, mostly so we can remember where those things are. We’re under no illusions that it matters, from a security standpoint. [Once, in India, there was a knock on the door, a man in a uniform pushed past me saying “safety box, safety box,” used a master key to unlock our safe, then turned around and left, all in under 30 seconds. We just watched, not even surprised, because weird things like that happen to us every day. Wrong room, I guess. Nowadays, that’s one of our favorite quotes: “Safety box, safety box!”]

If there’s not a safe, though, I ‘hide’ my passport in the drawer with my underwear, and I don’t worry about it. Of course no thief would think to look there.

I have a tiny jewelry bag that contains pearl earrings I bought in Hong Kong, and a bracelet and couple of rings that I bought in North Macedonia. I leave those on the nightstand every day. There’s never been a problem.

But a few weeks ago: my jar of peanut butter went missing.

I bought it the day after we arrived in Prague, because there was hot oatmeal on the breakfast buffet, and I like a little protein with my oats. Also, yum.

I took it to breakfast on Friday, but then I didn’t on Saturday, because we were planning to go straight out after breakfast. Then on Sunday, I forgot that I even had peanut butter until I was scooping porridge into a bowl, and I was too lazy to go back to the room to get it. So on Sunday evening, I decided to put the peanut butter next to my purse, so I wouldn’t forget it in the morning.

I couldn’t find it. I distinctly remembered taking it back to the room after breakfast on Friday, but Lee insisted I must have left it on the breakfast table. I knew I hadn’t, but the next morning, I duly asked the wait staff if they’d seen it. They hadn’t. Of course, they also didn’t speak English, so I wasn’t confident. The next day, I found the manager, who speaks perfect English, and asked him to go look in the kitchen.

No luck (because I didn’t leave it in the breakfast room, HUSBAND).

It was just gone. I looked everywhere I could possibly look in our room (which was not a lot of places—it was a very basic Holiday Inn room that had no real hidey-holes.)

Oh well. I shrugged, and went to the grocery store and bought another jar of peanut butter. Because an AWOL jar of peanut butter is a problem I can solve.

In a weird way, it confirmed my general trust in hotels—my hunch is that the housekeeper assumed I had picked up the peanut butter at breakfast and taken it to our room (which I know was the case with that spoon in Iceland). She probably thought she was doing the right thing.

I mean, think about hotels: I trust them to have reasonable fire prevention standards. I trust them to keep me safe from violent crime. I trust them to wash the sheets and vacuum the floor and wipe down the bathroom. I lie down in the bed and close my eyes and go to sleep. I’m trusting them with my actual life, which is way more important to me than my passport.

Yeah, my peanut butter disappeared. Oh well—no biggie.

All of this happened, of course, while our suitcases were being held hostage in Vienna. As if losing all of my worldly possessions hadn’t made me quite conscious enough of my great good fortune, the universe had to tweak me just a tiny bit more, by disappearing my peanut butter. Okay, Universe: I hear you loud and clear: It’s not about the stuff. Message received.

Take care,

Lisa

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