1. An Unfortunate Discovery
“Hi David,” Marcia said. I handed her my salad, which she put on the scale.
“That’ll be $7.29,” she said.
I looked up at her in a brief panic, “My Discover card is missing.”
“Oh no,” she said.
“It’s ok. I have another card.”
I pulled out the other card and swiped it… but the machine prompted me for a PIN. This wasn’t a credit card. It was a debit card that I never, ever use.
In this way, I discovered that not only was my Discover card missing, but so was my Visa, and so was my ATM card.
As panic began to descend upon me, Marcia showed me how to use that debit card as a credit card, which was fortunate, because otherwise I was going to have to abandon the salad and walk out hungry.
2. In A Real Panic
I was convinced that my cards, which are prone to sliding out of my wallet, had slid out when I grabbed my stuff from the dresser this morning in the dark. So when I got home in the afternoon, after greeting the tail-wagging dogs and giving Trudy a kiss, I walked into the bedroom. But to my grave disappointment, there was nothing on the dresser.
“And my driver’s license is gone, too!” I told Trudy.
It was gradually dawning on us that somebody had somehow taken my credit and ATM cards and driver’s license. I was cleaned out.
In denial, we began tracing our steps over the last few days. I called the barber shop. I called a restaurant. No joy. Still, there was virtually no time that we could reconstruct when my wallet had been outside my control. How could anyone have stolen anything?
So we began to think the unthinkable… that someone had come into the house Sunday while we were (all four of us) slaving away in the backyard.
Real panic began to set in, and I began to get jittery.
3. A Rubber Band
Over and over we tried to find an alternate explanation. What day was it when we went to Lowes? I paid for the popcorn at the movie, didn’t I?
But think about it. If you walked into someone’s house and needed to quickly look in one place for something to lift, it would be the dresser in the master bedroom, right? And my wallet had been there for many hours on Sunday — the only time we were apart.
Somebody had come into the house, made for the bedroom, found what they needed and quickly left.
Oh for heaven’s sake! Certainly not! Trudy kept going over the days, trying to find the explanation. I began to pace nervously back and forth. The jitters got worse, and I began to sweat.
My driver’s license and credit cards and ATM cards. They took nothing else. Just the good stuff.
And then on one of my passes thru the bedroom, I reached into the dirty clothes basket and felt in the pocket of a filthy pair of shorts I had worn Sunday. There was some kind of lump in the pocket. And my heart briefly stopped as I carefully reached in …and pulled out a lump of business cards and credit cards and an ATM card.
They had not been stolen. I had not left them at a store. They had not fallen out on my dresser or anywhere else. But what about my license? It can’t slip out of my wallet. Where was it?
I looked at my wallet again. Pulled out the empty sleeve where my license should have been. And there was my driver’s license in the sleeve backwards so that it seemed to be missing. It had never been missing in the first place.
At some point last night, a wad of business cards and plastic had slipped out of my wallet when I took it out of my shorts, probably at the end of the day when I took a shower and went to bed.
False alarm. Nothing was missing. No one had been in the house.
“I have to sit down,” I said to Trudy.
“You have to get a rubber band for your wallet,” Trudy said. “Just like your father.”