Yesterday, I was sitting down to finish up my February WBM blog post when my husband, who had just left the house to take the hound on her walk, came back in.
With a look of irritated bewilderment on his face he asked, “Where’s my car?”
Like an idiot, I said, “What?”
“My car’s gone. It’s not in the driveway.”
I had to go out and look which just shows that I was already in the grips of the first and perhaps nuttiest stage of grief—denial. I mean, it may be easy to misplace a set of car keys, but to lose track of an entire Honda? That’s not something that happens all that often. But Fred was right. There was no shiny, silver Accord next to my ancient, orange car, just a big, empty stretch of concrete and a sad, little wad of Kleenex by my car’s passenger door. Of course, we had to look in the garage even though we knew we hadn’t parked it in there. Then we looked up and down street, as if the car could have gotten restless in the middle of the night and gone walkabout on its own.
It wasn’t until I really looked at my car—Kleenex on the ground, passenger door ajar, glove-box hanging open with the bulk of its contents strewn on the passenger seat—that it donned on me that someone had rifled my car and stolen Fred’s! (It’s amazing what it takes to burst the little denial bubble.)
While I, ping-ponging between stunned disbelief and anger (note the second stage of grief kicking in here), took the hound for a perfunctory walk, in the rain—the girl still needed to potty, after all—Fred called the police.
Officer Martin arrived just as the Piebald Princess and I were coming back to the house. So, after toweling her off, I sat down at the dining table with Fred. Baffled and stunned, we answered the policeman’s questions.
After we’d gone through all of them—yes, the car was in the driveway when we went to bed; yes, the car was locked, but no, mine hadn’t been; no, the keys weren’t in it; yes, the car was paid off, etc.—I asked, “Can you give us an idea of how many stolen cars are ever recovered? Is it like twenty percent, thirty?” (Is this the bargaining stage?)
“Most of them. About ninety percent, actually.”
At my enthusiastic, “Really? That’s fantastic!” Officer Martin gave me a look that spoke volumes, and it said, Oh, you poor, pathetic, naïve, little bunny rabbit. You have no idea how trashed your car is going to be when we find it.
Until that moment, I had had hope. (Rounding third base and heading for home plate—depression. I mean really, we’d just finished paying the car off last year.)
But evidently, Officer Martin mistakenly thought I was heading back to stage two, because he cautioned us not to act on our own should we spot the car anywhere. If we saw it, we were to call the police right away and not confront anyone or attempt to recover the car ourselves. Of course, doing something like that never would have occurred to me—until Officer Martin mentioned it. The little seed was planted.
The seed germinated while I spent an hour and a half on the phone with the insurance company, and started to crack open as I set about alerting the neighbors. Since it was raining, I just sent emails instead of going door-to-door. Another couple of hours went by while Fred and I belatedly researched home security cameras (I’m not sure what stage this falls into), but by 4:00 p.m. the seed had sprouted, and I asked Fred if he wanted to go drive around with me and casually look for his car.
After disabling the garage door opener, because of course, one of the remotes had been in Fred’s car, and thoroughly locking up the house, we set out. Obviously, we didn’t find the car and soon realized the futility of even looking. (Acceptance setting in.)
Now, perhaps you’re wondering what all this has to do with the February Write by Midnight challenge, and the answer is absolutely nothing! Someone stole Fred’s car! (Uh-oh, a little backsliding into stage two there. Sorry about that.)
But now that I think about it, this post actually does have something to do with WBM. The whole point of WBM is to write every day, after all, and I did write today. I got down 795 words—just not on my manuscript. Instead, I wrote a mini-short story about the stages of grief and the loss of a beloved car—that was completely paid for!
Complete acceptance may take a while.
