Yes, it really did happen. I'm officially the luckiest person...
I started two drafts of this account but they both went badly. One was too whiny and the other too drowned in cheap Cabernet-Shiraz. You know you shouldn't post a blog once it becomes overplanned. Nevertheless, the news is that I got a call last Saturday late in the morning. It was from an unfamiliar number and an unfamiliar lady asking for Jacob Ivan Fernandez. She'd found a bag. I filled her in on the rest; she seemed kind of nervous. Maya and I went to breakfast at the Cricket. Usually the place is absolutely swarmed with hipsters on Saturday afternoon, but we got in quick. They seated us in the huge corner booth right on the corner. There was a group of six waiting and I felt bad, and woozy and offered them the seats but the waitress told us they wouldn't fit. She looked dead on her feet.
We luxuriated on the wide black naugahyde. I ordered a Pendleton's and coffee and she a grapefuit juice and we gorged ourselves on eggs, cheese, asparagus, and my good fortune. We paid and caught the 15 bus back up Belmont to the park where I figured it would be nicer to walk through than on the street. Wrrrong. We went about twenty blocks too far and had to take a bus down Division.
The misty yard was gated. I saw my bag sitting outside the door on the porch. The lady on the phone had said she was moving out of the house but that they had found the bag a few weeks earlier in the street. They'd figured it was a student who was riding their bike and dropped it. She had felt bad because someone had put a lot of work into those notebooks and there were textbooks as well.
By chance, in a Spanish class, I'd written my cell number in a notebook so that some classmates could see it as they wrote it down for those days when we couldn't make it and needed the assignment for the next class. Long an short; I can't lose things: cars, wallets, notes, books, phones, id's, watches, etc. It all comes back. It doesn't make sense and yet there's no reason it shouldn't.
When you feel so fortunate you inevitably feel guilty. Why should a dude like myself get all the luck? Well, there's a lot of people who need the luck worse than me, I don't pretend that ain't the case. I only have the worst kind of pity for folks that will feel bad for their good luck, though, 'cause anyone like that has things a lot worse to feel guilty about than me. I'll take it as it comes. I won't call it karma until it calls itself that, but I won't stop doing things because they feel like the right thing to do, because I ain't gonna push my luck.
