In a feat of impressive personal ineptitude, I've managed to misplace
(a) My wallet
(b) My wedding ring
(c) The packing tape
...all at once!
I'm confident that I did not manage to leave them all in the same place. Unfortunately if I don't find at least the wallet, the kids and I will be stuck in the house for the rest of today and beyond. Without a Drivers License or ATM card, we're fairly well stranded in the island town where we live for the foreseeable future.
Have I mentioned how FRUSTRATED I am?
There is only one thing I am truly grateful for in this situation, and that is that at least I have the good fortune to be at home right now. The last time I lost my wallet about a month ago, I didn't realize that it was gone until I was a 40 minute drive away from our house at the gas station with a fuel tank on Empty. I went to pump gas, realized the wallet was not in the car, and then it dawned on me that without my wallet I was truly stranded. No identification, no AAA card, no ATM card, nothing. I had a spare checkbook but the gas attendant would not take a check without ID. Nor would he allow my husband to give him a credit card number over the telephone.
Adding insult to injury it was raining hard and growing dark. Ultimately my poor husband had to drive north in heavy rush hour traffic to pay to fill up our car with gas so that I could follow him home to our house where my wallet was sitting cheerily on the kitchen counter.
I learned that time around just how scary it is to be without any proof of identity and no funds. As I waited in the car for my husband to rescue me, I thought about the fact that this is how people who live in and work in our country illegally must feel all of the time: Terrified!!!
Without a Driver's License or access to money, what happens if you are illegal and get pulled over by a police officer, need medical care, or run into an unsavory character but don't feel that they can alert authorities for help? I'm not a fan of illegal immigration but I understand why folks do it and I have a lot of compassion for how vulnerable they must feel every second while here... in many cases thousands of miles from friends and family who could help them.
I'm grateful then, to be home this time, so that at least if stuck without identification or money I am in my own home surrounded by my children, photos and belongings that prove I do have a place in this world. I have my house keys and plenty of food in the refrigerator, access to a telephone and relatives and friends just blocks away. I'm vulnerable, but also safe.
I wonder where my wallet will turn up? Where could my wedding ring be?
This brings back memories of our wedding reception when my brother lost his own wedding ring while helping to bake homemade lasagna for the guests. "It must have gone into the ricotta!" he exclaimed, and we all tried to imagine how it could slip right off of his hand into the mass of creamy cheese.
That evening at the big party, it was my job to announce to our guests that we were seeking a lost platinum wedding band. I could barely keep a straight face. I can't remember now exactly how I told our guests that somewhere in their dinner was a luxurious metallic object but I likened our dinner to a Mexican Wedding Cake and said that whomever was lucky enough to find the ring in their slice of vegetarian lasagna was sure to have a long life full of love.
Our 150 guests laughed kindly and ate carefully, looking through even the scraps of their dinner before handing back in their plates to the catering staff. By the end of the evening we had consumed all but three of the vegetarian lasagna, yet no wedding ring had turned up. My brother was a great sport about the whole thing and resolved to get a new ring made when he returned to his home in New York. Life continued.
Many months later my mother pulled the final vegetarian lasagna from our reception out of her freezer. "This has surely gone bad by now," she thought - and decided to thaw it out before disposing of it. "What are the odds that ring is in here?" She decided to go through this one last lasagna carefully before throwing it away.
You've guessed it! Sitting for all of that time inside of a frozen lasagna in my mother's garage - my brother's original wedding band!!! She found it! (Mom, you'll be lucky in love for the rest of your life!)
The story of the lost wedding ring has gone down in family lore as one of the funniest moments from our reception, and also as an example of "Anything is possible" and "If something is meant to be yours, you cannot truly lose it no matter how hard you try". Saint Anthony, patron of lost items, would be proud.
With my brother's ring as an example then, I have a lot of hope that my ring-wallet-tape will all turn up today or sometime soon... perhaps in the unlikeliest of places.
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