Motorola Meltdown

So, Saturday afternoon, having read, oh, 200 or so pages of a very good book, (Oh, and side note to one of the reviewers: "Opaque in places to American readership"? We're not morons. Well, not all of us.) And, feeling quite pleased with myself for getting up at a respectable hour for some time at the gym, followed by a load or two of laundry, I was doing what any self-respected woman would be doing.


I was asleep on the couch with my face buried in the cat.


Himself had gone to get us tickets to Dark Knight, which only had one showing on Saturday. I took his long absence to mean he'd wandered off somewhere else; the library, the bookstore, no matter, I'll just rest my eyes here awhile and....

....the front door bangs open and Himself stands there, wild eyed, like he'd just seen some unsuspecting citizen who'd been pottering along Main Street pulled into a van with tinted windows.

"My phone is gone."

Now, a moment of elucidation. Himself is a champion misplacer of things. We gave it a clinical name. I have been party to many frantic searches of cars, couches, suitcases, and what have you in our nearly 12 years of marriage. When we left the country I kept a death grip on the ziploc pouch that contained all of our tickets and travel documents, allowing him to hold his boarding pass only during those golden moments between "here you go" and "now boarding all rows". But pens, keys, wallets, remote controls, phones, orbit him just out of reach, a saturnalian ring of "I just had it" and "Have you seen my ____".

"What do you mean?"

"I left the house with it. I was talking to (the Sister)."

"Okay, so...let's go look in the car."

"I looked. I looked all over. It wasn't in there. Someone stole it. Someone took it while I was in the movie theater."

I call the library and advise them we are stopping over just to have another look. We arrive 7 minutes before closing and the kind ladies there are padding around on the soft carpeting, looking everywhere they'd seen him, on the off chance it was placed on top of a bookcase, in a cubbyhole. Its not there, nor is it on the grass outside the library. Nor in the sewer grate. (I figured what the heck, I may as well have a look.) We drive to the movie theater. I send him to the phone store, thinking perhaps if someone turned it on and saw the provider name (a relatively small and distinct provider) they'd drop it off, the store is only half a block from the theater. I try the doors, the theater is closed for the time being. I turn around and see a group of kids at the curb. One of them has a phone in each hand. I approach her and realize the phone she is talking on looks very familiar.

I discover that this girl is on the phone with my mother in law. The kids found the phone in the street. They opened it, looked in the address book, and called "Mom", rightly assuming that they'd picked the one person who would know how to reach us. We thanked them profusely, and before we could offer to buy them ice cream or something they scurried off to shop across the street, and we drove home, discussing the merits of a belt-mounted CASE for his small and (apparently slippery) phone.