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11.08.11
“Where are my glasses?” I asked, rummaging through the bag I'd just thrown in my trunk. I had them five seconds ago, in their case, in my bag. We had just parked at the golf club, semi-punctual for the last of the wedding celebrations.
“On your face?” offered Ce.
Those would be my prescription sunglasses, which I doubt I could have worn through the evening without looking like a douche. Also, I probably would have tripped on something.
I glanced around the side of the car, and on the pavement next to the door lay my glasses, in their case. I swapped them with my sunglasses and put the case and the bag in the trunk.
“Where’s my wallet?” I asked, feeling the too-empty inside pockets of my suit jacket. I had stashed the wallet in one of them, but as it was a searingly hot August afternoon, had my jacket over my arm or in the backseat for the short drive between my place and the club. A quick search of the car revealed nothing. My best guess would be that it fell out either where I had my jacket sitting on the couch, or somewhere between my apartment and the parkade, as I whipped around the corners of the stairwells. The most troubling issue was that I had just driven there without my license.
With nothing else to do about it, we went in and I tried not to dwell.
We rolled out past midnight and I drove, extremely carefully, back to my place for a pit stop before sending my passengers home. I ran up the same stairwells and looked fruitlessly at my wallet-free couch. I re-traced my route to the car, again without result, and resumed my route across the city, going at exactly the speed limit and not pushing any lights.
After returning home, and despite the hour, I booted up the computer. My best hope was that someone found my wallet in the stairs, googled me, and found my email. Logging in revealed nothing of the sort. Instead I looked up my credit card company’s emergency number and called them. After giving them the card number, they asked a few security questions:
“What’s the first three digits of your social insurance number?”
I got it wrong.
“Can you give me any three consecutive digits?”
I got the last three.
“Where do you work?”
I told him.
“Um, before that?”
Other museum? Lab job?
“Nope. Okay, how long have you had this card?”
Shot in the dark.
“Close enough.”
I was given the option of cancelling the card immediately or putting a hold on it. I chose the hold, hoping some non-techno-savvy neighbour had picked it up and would see the sad little signs I was currently writing with the intent of putting them up in the elevators and common areas. While I was on the phone, we also took the opportunity to update my personal info. For my employer they had listed “Mosiac”, a typo of the name of a company I worked for part-time while going to school, and so we cleared up that bit of ancient history. I was quasi-reassured nothing catastrophic was going to happen, though while on hold I had listed everything I remembered in my wallet. While nothing was irreplaceable, it was going to be a major hassle at best. Sometime around 2am I went to bed.
At 5:30am my eyes pinged open in one of those cartoon moments of lucidity.
Check the other jacket.
I stumbled to the closet in the dark and felt for the other suit jacket I had hanging next to the one I wore that evening. My fingers closed on a rectangle of smooth leather. In the whirlwind of coming back from a midday barbecue, showering, changing, tracking down late people, and fielding a last-minute-but-turned-out-not-to-be-urgent call from the groom while running out of minutes on my cell phone, I’d put the wallet in the wrong coat.
I removed it from the pocket, laid it reverentially in the middle of my dining table, and went back to bed for sleep untroubled by lost belongings, secure in the comfort of my own absent-mindedness.
*For those of you who may be, or may be married to, law enforcement officers, this story is pure fiction and no motor vehicle was ever operated by me without the presence of a valid class 5 drivers license on my person. Also, I did not inhale.
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©d.tan  |
