Mad Times

Lost gloves in New York

Faithful reader Dan points out this item from Talk of the Town in The New Yorker about Alexandra Horowitz, a fellow collector of lost gloves.

Last winter, Horowitz began collecting the misplaced—trampled, forlorn, snot-slicked—mittens and gloves that she saw on the street, not for the sake of research or even, God forbid, art, but out of some deep-seated altruistic urge to see them reunited with their other halves.

Hers is more of an active search than the passive discovery that informs my own lost glove studies. She has a collection of 118+ gloves and mittens (excluding work gloves and disposables which she doesn't disturb), 10 times the number I have seen around Issaquah in a similar period, but that's no surprise since there are probably far beyond 10 times as many walkers on any given street in NYC than in my car-centric suburb.

As to motive, she says, "The melancholy of a lost glove sitting in the middle of a sidewalk struck me as minorly tragic, for the glove and for its owner." And on that I agree completely.