Thank you Carolyn
your suggestion to explore Finder more thoroughly led me to use it as a keyword search resulting in this article:
http://www.andrewandoru.com/2009/02/20/labs-maya-recover/
go to a Finder window press Cmd
ShiftG, and type /private/var/folders/ and press return. In that "folders" folder is a bunch of arbitrarily named folders, in one of those there should be a -Tmp- folder that will likely have some .ma recent recovery files.
Just unzip the file, and place it in a easy to find directory (I recommend the default Maya directory in your User/Documents/maya folder, so it is always easy to find).
Thank you