This is a story about wanting someone to do the right thing,
and not giving a crap if they do it for the right reason.
My 7 year-old daughter is obsessed with my ipad. It is how I
get her to wake up cheerfully in the morning. I am not proud of this. But I am
not ashamed either. (I have a 15 year-old who reluctantly attends seminary. I
cannot have too many battles before breakfast.) I bring it into her room and
she hears the click as I woosh it on and sees the red glow of Netflix and she
perks up and starts her day with a smile and Horseland.
8:20 It is time to go wait for the bus, she knows she must
leave her ipad buddy behind. But two weeks ago, while I was putting her lunch
in her backpack and told her to wait on the front porch, she snuck the ipad
under her coat. Once at the end of the drive where we wait, she insisted she
needed an extra snack. I think she thought she’d get to finish her show if I
were inside. As I come back out I see her getting on the bus. I wave to the
back of her head and go back inside.
3:15 My peanut gets home and runs upstairs. “Mom,” she says
very seriously, “where is the ipad?” “Wherever you left it this morning I
guess.” She fidgets. “Um, I left it outside. In the bushes. Sticking out of the
snow.” I feel sick as we head to the driveway and I KNOW what I will not find. We
live on a busy street where anyone seeing an ipad sticking out of the snow at
the end of our drive could snatch it. And did I mention that it was trash day,
and the empty cans and blue bins stood a foot away from us. She points to an
ipad size indentation in the snow by the mailbox. “Right there,” she said. When
I asked why on earth she put it in the snow she says, “Well I knew you’d be so
mad if I took it to school.” I shook my
head at her first grade logic. “Mom, I am so so sorry. All day I had a bad
feeling in my stomach and I wanted to go to the office and call you so you
could go get it, but I don’t think they let you go to the office unless your
sick or in trouble.” Deep sigh. I gave her a big hug and reassured her that I
wasn’t mad at her. One of the sucky things about getting older is you get to
experience more sadness, more loss, more pain. But a benefit is that this level
of suckiness can give you perspective and compassion. I love my technology and
was delighted when my husband’s company upgraded him to a fancy ipad and I got
his old one. So I was sad but not prepared to go nuts. Lets be clear that in
the pantheon of loss, this was not worthy of deep anguish.
3:30 As I am on hold with the town getting the name of the
waste management company, it occurs to me to use the “find my iphone” app which
links all our devices and can track them via GPS. I proceed to a) locate it, b)
lock it, and c) send a “please call” message.
I tell Nikki at WM headquarters what has happened. She says no one has
said they found an ipad. I tell her the intersection where the GPS places it in
Somerville. She tells me to file a
police report, takes my number, wishes me luck.
4:00 I am sitting at the police station giving a report. I
show the officer where the ipad is. He says he’ll call the Somerville police
but that all they will do is drive to the location and see if the ipad is
sitting there on the ground. Honestly. Where are Cagney and Lacey when I need
them?! Maybe, he offers, his captain will let him drive around the area and
knock on doors, but probably not.
Frustration sets in. What my daughter did was stupid, but that the
police were not going to do anything seemed more stupid. I am officially mad.
4:20 I call my girlfriend Jen to update her on the ipad
saga. She insists I pick her up and we drive to Somerville to “try to get a
visual on the suspect’s home.” She watched NCIS. And Castle. So we leave our
uptight little Boston suburb, a place so persnickety it refuses to let the
subway or most chain stores into our hallowed grounds. We start referring to
ourselves as Cagney and Lacey and wonder if we sent the loud pinging noise via
“find my iphone” if we could hear it if we knocked on doors. I’m feeling
baddass as we drive through Cambridge and head into the hip part of Somerville,
all funky ethnic restaurants and hippy chic shops. But where the GPS leads us
is neither funky nor chic. The houses
and apartments are run down and my minivan feels conspicuously out of place.
When we stop in front of where the blue dot is, a dark house sits that seems to
be giving me the finger. Jen informs me that we are not to leave the car; she
reminds me we are Cagney and Lacey, not Thelma and Louise. We will not die for
an ipad, and for sure not a first generation.
4:50 Officer O’Leary calls and says that he spoke to the WM
company and they think it might still be on a truck, to call in the morning
There are no trash trucks around. So I do a search and discover that one of
their offices is just a half mile away.
I doubt that the GPS might be off by the much but we head there anyway.
The guy at the booth informs us that it’s a giant trash warehouse. All trash
has been dumped and consolidated. No trucks are there. My ipad, if in a truck,
is gone. He smiles at this. I see through his scraggly beard that there are
teeth missing. We have lost our bravado, realize how stupid we were to think we
could have, what, knocked on a door and demanded of a stranger, “Hand me my
ipad!” Cagney and Lacey no more, we return to our sleepy town.
9:00pm Bea enters my room and says she cannot sleep. My
husband asks what is keeping her awake. “Guilt,” she says, clutching her
stomach. I put her in our bed and cuddle her. I can’t sleep either. I am
embarrassed at how sad I feel about the whole thing. I refuse to pray for the ipad’s
return because I know my prayers are powerful and it feels wrong to waste faith
on an apple product. I want to be better than that. Instead I pray to
understand why I am so upset. I decide
it’s because my life feels out of my control.
Just as I knew the spot where my lost item was, but could do nothing to
retrieve it, so too I often know what the problems are in my life, what it
would take to fix them, but don’t have the tools necessary. I toss and turn.
2:00am I check the GPS app one more time. It is still at the
dark house. I fall asleep feeling helpless.
7:30am My husband wakes me up and says that Nikki from WM
has called. The ipad has been found. Call them. I talk to Nikki and this is
what she says: the trash guys didn’t take the ipad, the recycling guy did. He
saw it in the snow and thought it was newspaper (the cover looks like an old
map). He put it in the truck, which began having mechanical trouble. So instead
of dumping his truck he takes it to the main location to await a mechanic. He
hears an ipad is missing, looks for it and finds it. Voila. A miracle. It will
be waiting for me at Nikki’s desk. I
check the GPS and the blue dot is now several miles from the dark house, now over
by the Target I go to sometimes. I know I’ve just been fed a story but I don’t
care. I need the ipad back so that I can maintain the illusion that my life is
in order. And so that Bea can stop having that sad look on her face like she
knows she’s let me down.
1:00pm I arrive at the office, located under a giant
overpass. There are several men in the parking lot, but no broken recycling
trucks. I bring with me a dozen donuts
and two gift cards to Duncan Donuts. I hand one to Nikki, thanking her for her
help. She hands me my ipad and shows me that it is not broken or damaged in any
way. It’s screen is amazingly clean and fingerprint free. I hand her the other
gift card and ask that she give it to the worker who found and returned the
ipad. I am so relieved that I start to
buy into the fiction that we are acting out. Yes it could be mistaken for
newspaper. Maybe they moved the truck. GPSs can be off. In a final gesture of
gratitude to Nikki, I offer to write a letter to the manager or whomever to let
them know how helpful she has been. We
Mormon women write a mean thank you note and know how nice it is to have thankless
jobs recognized. Nikki stops smiling.
“No,” she almost shouts. “No letter. You have your ipad. We’re all set.”
1:10pm As I get in my car, the men in the lot are now
obviously staring. “You get your ipad?” one asks. I smile and say yes, and ask if they were the
ones who found it. They are quick to deny any association with the item. I tell
them to go get a donut before they are all gone.
1:30pm Driving home my inner Cagney & Lacey return and
piece together what must have happened. It couldn’t have been hard, once I gave
Nikki the cross streets shown on the Find iphone GPS, for her to look at the
roster, see which dump truck had my route, and figure out who lived where the
blue dot was. I’m sure a call was made
where she informed him that a report had been filed with the police, but if the
ipad was on her desk in the morning, all might be forgiven. The ipad was easy pickings, sticking out of
the snow. Of course someone snatched it. But once I’d locked it, reported it
missing, and gotten his work involved, keeping it wasn’t worth the trouble. A
story was cooked up and I would be expected to swallow it.
And I don’t care. I don’t care that my trash guy only gave
back the ipad because he got caught. Of course it’s ideal for all of us to do
the right thing for the right reason. Kids should apologize to siblings because
they feel sorrow and not just because they’ll get a time out if they don’t.
Spouses should remember birthdays without needing post it notes left by the birthdayee.
Visiting teaching should be done because we care and not because it’s the 31st
and we feel guilty. But sometimes even
the imperfect victories still feel good, and honestly, being mad is exhausting.
Life is messy--I’ll take what I can get.
