I Lost My Siddur

I seem to have misplaced my siddur. I'm fairly certain that it is somewhere in the house, I'm just not sure where.

Now, you may be wondering why I'm worried about a simple siddur. After all, we must have a dozen siddurim in our house, and when I go to shul, there is always an ample supply. But, you see, this siddur is special to me.

I bought it back around 1984. It was a small pocket-sized weekday Metsudah siddur. It was the type of siddur that you simply get into the habit of using -- there was nothing special about it (other than the fact that I liked the intra-linear setup) that caused me to value it over any other siddur.

That was until 1994. By 1994 I was considering replacing the siddur. The lettering and cover design had long since faded to the point where the cover is just a plain maroon cover. The pages were getting a bit worn (as one might expect after ten years) and the sides of the pages and the corners had long since gone from white to dark grey. It was getting to the point where it was time to move on to a new siddur.

That was when Walter got a hold of the siddur.

Walter was about a year old... maybe a year and a half. He somehow got a hold of my siddur (to this day I still don't know how) and a pen. Like a true artist, he used whatever canvas he had... in this case, the pages of my siddur.

The damage wasn't too bad. Some scribbles on the pages with Adom Olam, Yigdal and Brachos at the beginning and some more by Ashrei-U'va L'tziyon at the end of Shacharis. Overall, the siddur was still quite usable. But now, I found that it had a new purpose. Now I found that when I opened up the siddur at the beginning of the day to the start of davening, I found that I had a tangible reminder of some of the reasons that I need to daven. I found that by having these scribbles on the pages, I was reminded of my son (and since then, the rest of my kids as well) and it helped to give a new focus to my davening.

Sadly, the siddur has been misplaced. I'm fairly certain it's in the house. If you're in my house and you see an old pocket-sized softcover maroon siddur, with no markings on the cover, my name in the front, and scribbles on some of the pages, please make sure to let me know. I miss it.

The Wolf