Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

Yesterday morning Megan called me at the day job to inform me that some kid had stolen my bicycle off our back porch. She was home at the time and caught a glimpse of him heading out the back gate with the bike.

To be honest I wasn’t all that upset. I was busy with a ton of other things, I had barely touched the bike in years, and it was my own damn fault for storing the bike unchained on the porch for the past year in full view of the neighborhood kids that often play in the back alley. The temptation was probably too great for some 10-year-old. You might say I was asking for it.

This is why I’m going to live to be 130 — I can rationalize away a brazen daylight robbery with logic like: well, at least the bike’s getting used by someone now. Or: now that the bike’s been stolen, I can stop worrying about the bike getting stolen. See? It’s my denial-based approach to stress-free living. It was better knowing that it was a neighbor kid who probably played in the alley, and not a master bike thief, ninjas or band of bored teens on a crime spree. Either way I was pretty sure we’d never see the bike again.

So many hours later I returned from work and we went to the grocery store about three miles away. On the way out, a kid on a bike passed in front on us on the sidewalk.

“Hey, that’s my bike!” I joked quietly so that only Megan could hear. “Oh, wait, no it’s not…”

He sorta-kinda fit the description of the kid Megan saw, but it wasn’t him and it wasn’t my bike. And I was making a joke anyway. The bike was long gone.

“Actually, isn’t that your bike over there?”

She pointed over to the wall next to the store entrance and indeed, there was my bicycle, leaning against it.

No one nearby claimed to know anything about the bike. So we re-stole it, packing it in the car boot with the groceries.

After remarking on our incredible luck in finding the bicycle in a city of a half-million residents, at a grocery store we might not have chosen to go to, we figured one of the following scenarios must have occurred:

1. The kid was inside the store — perhaps stuffing candy bars down his pants — when we discovered the bike. In which case: HA! Now YOU know what it’s like to have a bike stolen, sucka.
2. The kid took the bike for a joyride but abandoned it outside the store when he realized his mom would skin him alive if he came home with a stolen bike.
3. The bike has mysterious talismanic powers which cause it to return to its original owner. Like a cursed monkey’s paw, but without the granting of wishes with horrific consequences and stuff.
4. The Universe decided to reward me for displaying almost Zen-like non-attachment. (Dear Universe: I absolutely have no desire whatsoever for a cool thousand bucks right now. Thanks.)

In any case, the bike is now home and stored away out of sight, as it should have been anyway. Actually, I’m kind of hoping that the kid who took it sees me riding it one day, thereby causing him to question whether he ever really stole the bike, ponder his direction in life, the role of synchronicity and serendipity in the Universe, and other existential matters. And then one of his friends will hit him in the crotch with a football.