When it comes to luck, there are two categories of people in this world: those who discover a $20 bill in their pocket that they didn’t know they had, and those who turn every pocket they own inside out muttering, “I just know I put my last goddamned twenty dollars in ONE of these pockets…”

I happen to fall under category #2.

There are a million things I’ve lost over the course of a lifetime, and if I sit down and think about it, I would tar and feather myself for a joyous reunion with my losses over the past six months alone. There’s the diamond that fell out of my engagement ring—an irreplaceable symbol of my union with the man I love throughout a decade of blissful matrimony. (The truth? Two thousand dollars for a shiny piece of carbon the size of my pinky nail. It’s enough to make me cry harder than I did at the altar.) Of course, there’s Anna’s toy pony, which she has been pestering/ harassing/ borderline stalking me about around the clock over the past 86.5 days since its disappearance. Then there’s every homework assignment my Hartford students have handed in over the past ten years. (At least, I think I lost them. That’s what they keep telling their parents.) I would part the Red Sea with nothing but a really long shovel if I could find the knob to my computer speaker, which I now flick on and off with a pair of tweezers from Eva’s Doc McStuffin’s medical kit. And last, there’s that missing piece to the Noah’s Ark puzzle from the Simsbury Public Library. Who knew the children’s librarian would actually count all 299 pieces and charge me for the whole damn thing?

And so, with the onset of spring, I decided to give the house a thorough spring cleaning (i.e., ransacking) in search of these items. Among my discoveries was a crayon melted into the heater, an expired 10% off coupon to Bob’s, and a sippy cup full of milk so spoiled I had to run it through the garbage disposal.

Just once, I’d like to reach into my pocket and find that $20 bill, rather than a wad of used tissue or a handful of goldfish crackers I picked off the floor of my car.

Until then, the search continues. Even if I lose my mind in the process.

In an effort to finish our nightmare of an addition that has been two years in the making, Doug and I have decided to refinance our mortgage. When I came home from work today, I discovered our “Mortgage Development Officer” sitting at our kitchen table. Harry is a typical bank guy—suit, glasses, bald with a gray ring of hair around his head. He talked about things I don’t get and never will, like fixed vs. adjustable rates, closing costs, APR’s, FHA’s, ABCDEFJ’s (it’s all the same to me).

As I stood there wondering how many more nods and ugh-huh’s it would take for me to pass out, he finally started speaking my language—or at least, his phone did. There he was, this old guy standing before me in the middle of my kitchen, with “Welcome to the Jungle” blasting from his iPhone. G N’ R—it was the one acronym I could comprehend all evening.

What I couldn’t comprehend was what this bald-headed bank guy with a briefcase stuffed with financial reports and loan applications could possibly be doing with a ringtone set to Guns ‘N Roses. Wouldn’t Bing Crosby be more his speed? Who did he think he was, infringing on my generation?

As he started rattling off his favorite bands, Ozzy Osbourne included, it occurred to me that this man WAS my generation. Before he left, we discovered he was fifty-two. That’s twelve years older than I am. There is less of an age gap between me and boring middle-aged Mortgage Officer Guy than me and my little sister.

I am having a pre-fortieth-birthday crisis. I think back about the way I used to talk about forty with my best friend from the teen years, Carrie Copeland. Whenever someone said something particularly uncool or out-of-touch, we’d roll are eyes and sigh, “What are you, forty?!” When some dirty old man hit on us, we wailed in revulsion, “Ewwww! Isn’t he, like, forty?!” When our parents grounded us and banished us to our rooms, we protested, “What are you going to do…keep me in here until I’m FORTY?!”

Tomorrow, I officially enter that faraway era that I couldn’t fathom back in the day, when people who said “back in the day” were older than Santa, Guns ‘N Roses was light years away from being oldies but goodies, and becoming the first female president was still a possibility (assuming I’d learn from then till my inauguration how to balance a checkbook). I am now that ancient, unfathomable age my parents were when they shook their heads listening to me rationalize why I needed to take a year off between high school and college, rent-free, of course, to “discover myself.” I am now entering that “mature” generation that needs its own separate sports leagues, dating services, and hair styles. I can feel my car insurance rates plummeting as we speak. And I don’t like it one bit.

Here’s to a brand new decade…of babies turning into drivers, approximately two hundred sixty boxes of hair dye with superior gray coverage, and finally having an excuse for being dead tired. Cheers?