Dusty Zebra

If you’re human, you can’t keep a thing around the house.
You’re always losing things and never finding them and you go charging through the place, yelling, cross-examining, blaming.
That’s the way it is in all families.
Just one warning—don’t try to figure out where all those things have gone or who might have taken them. If you have any notion of investigating, forget it. You’ll be happier! I’ll tell you how it was with me.
I’d bought the sheet of stamps on my way home from the office so I could mail out the cheques for the monthly bills. But I’d just sat down to write the cheques when Marge and Lewis Shaw dropped over. I don’t care much for Lewis and he barely tolerates me. But Marge and Helen are good friends, and they got to talking, and the Shaws stayed all evening.
Lewis told me about the work he was doing at his research laboratory out at the edge of town. I tried to switch him off to something else, but he kept right on. I suppose he’s so interested in his work that he figures everyone else must be. But I don’t know a thing about electronics and I can’t tell a microgauge from a microscope.
It was a fairly dismal evening and the worst of it was that I couldn’t say so. Helen would have jumped all over me for being antisocial.
So, the next evening after dinner, I went into the den to write the cheques and, of course, the stamps were gone.
I had left the sheet on top of the desk and now the desk was bare except for one of the Bildo-Bloeks that young Bill had outgrown several years before, but which still turn up every now and then in the most unlikely places.
I looked around the room. Just in case they might have blown off the desk, I got down on my hands and knees and searched under everything. There was no sign of the stamps.
I went into the living room, where Helen was curled up in a chair, watching television.
“I haven’t seen them, Joe,” she said. “They must be where you left them.”