Lost in the numbers

About for days ago (maybe it was five), I noticed that one of our coffee cups was missing, and I mentioned it to my wife this morning as I was putting some dishes into the washer after breakfast.
    She started to count the cups in that pattern, but I said she needn't bother, I was sure that there were only five in the kitchen now.
    She wondered what had happened to the sixth cup, then? Had she set it down some place? She went to look in the spots where she might have done that.
    While she was out of the kitchen, I looked again in the refrigerator—sometimes we set a cup in there.
    Still not there.
    I looked in the free-standing cupboard. Still not there either. (At least, I think I'd already looked there, too—at least once.)
    She returned and said she didn't seem to have set it down anywhere. Had I set it down? How about upstairs (in the "loft" above the garage where my computer is), or out in the shed (where I had recently installed some electrical wiring)?
    I'd looked in these places already also, and the cup was still in neither place.

Okay, then, she said, if we hadn't set it down someplace, what about Joaquin¹? He's the man who cleans our house once a week. He may be the best, most reliable cleaner my wife has ever engaged, but he has nevertheless broken a number of items, including, she says, all of her little ceramic "California Missions" coaster tiles.
    Well, it was possible, of course, that Joaquin had broken it. If so, it would be characteristic of him not to mention it. If it had been broken into smithereens, he might simply have discarded it.
    Still, surely not. We didn't want to believe it.

But if not Joaquin, then, what about André? He'd come over to help us get Thanksgiving over with for another year.
    Could André have taken it when he left?
    No, André could never have done that. Anyway, he left on Friday, and I was pretty sure there had been six cups on Saturday and Sunday. Nevertheless, I went into the guestroom to check whether he might have left it sitting on the nightstand.
    No, not there either.
    I went back into the kitchen to finish loading the dishwasher. Why not count one more time? I asked myself.
    Okay, there are two in the cupboard to the right of the stove. And, in the dishwasher, one, two, three,...four!?

I told my wife the sixth cup had just turned up. "It had just gotten lost temporarily in the numbers," I said.
    "You're probably not getting enough Vitamin B-12," she said. "The vegetarian kick...."
    I thought, but didn't say it, that I was probably eating enough meat. When André was here, she told me that if I didn't eat any turkey, I couldn't have anything else either. No sweet potatoes, no Brussels sprouts and tomatoes, no.... And no pumpkin pie.
    Of course I ate some turkey. Besides, as I've told my readers, I routinely compromise the moral principle of respecting other animals' right to life for the sake of the moral principle of not dishonoring my meal provider by refusing her offerings. (But, as I've also told my readers, I sometimes doubt whether I can honorably justify that compromise. I continue in a quandary over this.)

Things often get lost, or found, in the numbers—the loss or the finding conjured from the whole cloth of imperfect thought.
    When I believed in God, I was but finding him in the numbers. He was nowhere to be found in extra-mental reality.
    Just as I finally discovered that the cup was only missing in the numbers, so did I finally realize that God was only to be found there too, and not worth such finding.
    Most people (a majority of Americans, anyway) are patently more successful in performing that conjuring trick than I was.
    It's probably because of all the meat they eat.
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1. Not his real name