What's Lost Isn't Always Lost
…or Toys Down the Storm Drain
Our most memorable losses are sometimes the most inconsequential ones.
Once when I was five, my brother and I were bored outside of church, because our parents were talking to the big people again. So we started playing catch with my Luke Skywalker action figure and after one fumbled throw, Luke dropped through the iron grate of a storm drain. I still have the memory of seeing my prized toy only four feet away, but absolutely inaccessible.
Later, when I was six, and in the midst of a string of hotels for a cross-country move, I accidentally left behind my favorite stuffed animal in one of the hotels. I can’t remember all the other stuffed animals I kept, but still remember SleepyTime Care Bear.
I was recently reminded of this, because my youngest son is terrified of barber shops (due to sensory issues around noise), but he summoned all his courage and went to get a haircut. The barber let him choose from a small treasure box of cheap junky toys. He grabbed a plastic red car, which was destined to fall apart in 24 hours or less.
As a reward for his bravery, we walked to the playground nearby. When our time was up, we went on for more errands. An hour later, in the middle of Kroger he realized he’d lost his Temu-junk car and was heartbroken. On the way home we drove past the playground, but it was gone. His little heart broke and there were far more tears than a cheap toy deserves.
To this day, he still calls that park the place where he lost his favorite toy, and he won’t bring any toys into parks for fear they will suffer the same fate.
No doubt, you too have some memory of a small, inconsequential loss of a toy or some plaything as a kid. (For fun, you can share the story in the comments, if you like!)
But why do I mention all this? What does the “one that got away” have to do with writing?
Well, because I recently learned that exactly one hundred years ago, in 1925, J.R.R. Tolkien’s son lost his little toy dog on a beach.
It happened to be a beach of grey shingle stones, the same size and color as the toy. So to alleviate the little boy’s heartache, Tolkien wrote a little book called Roverandom about the lost dog’s adventures. Its main literary significance is that readers see a lot of foreshadowing of the later Lord of the Rings in all the fanciful world-building that Tolkien creates. Part of Roverandom’s world-building is an isle of dogs, where lost dogs eventually end up.
And that made me wonder, is there an isle of lost ideas? Because if you’re like me, in addition to remembering the toys that got away, you still remember forgetting little flashes of insight that you didn’t have a chance to write down. I do this constantly. My brain tends to be very scattered, and so for over a decade, I kept trying to create a system of keeping notes in my pocket so I’d never lose an idea again. But then I’d forget the notebook! So all those ideas would fall through the storm drain, lost forever.
Or so I thought…
Once, I discovered a notebook lost years ago. It was filled with ideas and concepts long forgotten. But what surprised me most was how many of those ideas had popped back up in other projects and been recycled with slight differences.
Perhaps what’s lost isn’t as lost as it seems.
I once read a quote that resonated with me, but I’ve never been able to remember who said it or find it again, so I will summarize it poorly below:
“Perhaps the best stories of all are the unwritten ones. Stories of immense possibility and grandeur that can contain all the hints of the inexpressible in their fragmentary and uncreated haze. But to actually create that narrative into black and white text is to lose almost all of its wonder and to chain it down.”
I suppose it’s appropriate that I can’t remember the originator of the quote about forgetting.1
The technical term for what I’m talking about is the sublime, the ineffable place where all narratives start deep in the human heart. I think there’s an element of the divine in it, a hint of the unsearchable seas of creativity that God gave all of humanity when he made us in his image.
However, for me, that maddening recurring phenomenon of lost inspiration was solved when I got a smart phone with a notes app. The thing’s always in my pocket, and so a note pad is always available.
Problem solved.
Well, sort of.
I’m grateful for the notes app and I use it constantly, but the funny thing I learned is that so many of the “genius ideas” I retain on the app are no good. It’s often the inkling of something else tied up in those ideas that was what I was trying to capture. Sometimes they’re just complete gibberish. The thing I was trying to get at is too shy a thing to be chained into any app.
Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote: “When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.”
Perhaps there’s some truth to that, or perhaps “the ideas that got away” are more like my little one’s flimsy toy that would have fallen apart if he’d not lost it. It was the idea of the toy that was so beautiful, not the toy itself.
Over a dozen years after Tolkien’s son Michael had lost his little gray dog on the seaside, he was an anti-aircraft gunner stationed in France during World War 2. We have an excerpt from a letter his father wrote him. It was a deeply-felt letter, and the longing still echoes out of the words 80 years later. The letter is briefer than Roverandom, but it again touching on the final destiny of lost things.
He wrote:
Let us both take heart of hope and of faith. The link between father and son is not only of the perishable flesh: it must have something of aeternitas about it. There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued.”
And that I believe is the true meaning of our lasting memory of lost toys, lost ideas or even lost quotes. Even when we’re little kids we know that we have lost something of infinite value, and when we lose something of small value, it prods us in that same spot. The reminder may be a cheap Luke Skywalker toy, but it’s reminding us of something that is of infinite value. Our lost toys, our lost ideas should remind us that there is a place where unwritten stories do reside. They’re not gone.
They’re not forgotten forever.
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"Squinting into the beam of light, Kathy Waters watched the silhouetted figure stagger across the hardwood and clutch his throat. He spluttered a small cloud that swirled with dust specks before dissolving into darkness beyond the spotlight. Finally, after one last side-step, he leaned perilously forward and collapsed to the floor. The thud echoed through the vaulted room. Kathy pursed her lips and inhaled audibly through her nose. How many times will it take for this man to die?!"
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“Nothing is lost on the breath of God, nothing is lost forever,
God's breath is love, and that love will remain,
holding the world forever.
No feather too light, no hair too fine,
no flower too brief in its glory, no drop in the ocean,
no dust in the air, but is counted and told in God's story.”
- Colin Gibson, “Nothing is Lost on the Breath of God”
I keep thinking it was Tolkien, but apparently Google doesn’t agree with me.
 | A guest post by
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I remember reading “Roverandom” to my kids a few years ago! There’s a similar story about Kafka. While walking in a park, he met a little girl who was crying because of a lost doll. It is said that he wrote letters to the little girl from the doll, insisting that she wasn’t lost—merely traveling. There’s a lovely picture book called “Kafka and the Doll” that retells the story.
As for losing things, my college dormitory was hit by an EF-4 tornado. I was saddest to lose a teddy bear named Ollie. He was my mom’s childhood bear, passed down to me, and I still remember the rough feel of his fur and his sweet glass eyes. My younger son’s middle name is Oliver, in part, because of my lost bear.
Beautiful article. Thanks for sharing.
Great post, Sam!
I told a version of the following lost toy story for Inktober a couple of years ago...
On Feb 8, 1973, a storm dropped 16 inches of snow on Warner Robins, Georgia. I was three and a half years old. This snowstorm made a big impression on me. I had quite a large Tonka truck that got completely buried; it was just the slightest bulge in the snow. Being unfamiliar with the idea of melting snow, I never expected to see that Tonka truck again. But the snow did melt, and I found out, as you said, Sam, that what's lost isn't always lost. This is one of my earliest memories.
That snowstorm very much gave me the wrong idea as to what I could expect from Middle Georgia winters going forward.