Land of the Lost
A Monday morning. A lost phone. A new friend.
“I believe everything happens for reason,” the woman who stood across from me said. She had been explaining about her long slog to finally finish law school. She had a job meanwhile, doing the prickly work of community relations for a large construction project, to support her family. She said it with conviction, that her drawn out suffering was part of the plan, and so I, too, believed in that moment that everything happens for a reason. For her, the long and winding road to what she envisioned as her success was a test and a divine mission. I teeter between it all matters and none of it matters, but today, at work, on a Monday morning, facing a woman who put on the tough exterior to match her tough job, it all mattered.
Maybe even losing my work phone happened for a reason. It took me six weeks into my new job for me to lose my work phone, an event I knew to expect the moment I received it, and felt its smooth slippery surface, the slim rectangle both fragile (don’t drop it!) and unexpectedly weighty, like a baby. I am clumsy and absent-minded, so I had immediately ordered a protective case for it online, but when it arrived, and I wrestled the teal green case out of its packaging, I found that it didn’t fit. Too small. I hadn’t ordered another yet, irritated by the unending list of things gone not quite right that I needed to remember to fix, to try again, to cure.
That morning, I pinged my phone again to see that it was still showing up as a red balloon pin at the bus facility on the other side of town. This meant, I was sure, that it must still be on the bus on which I had left it the Thursday evening before, not yet fetched and delivered to the Lost and Found located in a different city. (I am, of course, familiar with the lost and found, because that phone was not the first item I had left on the commuter bus).
I told the Lost and Found this, that I could see where my phone was thanks to the miracle of modern technology. The person on the other line did not seem convinced by my evidence or swayed by my sense of urgency and told me I would receive a call if a phone was found. So, on my own divine mission, I got into my car and drove to the location of the bus facility, determined to find my phone while it was still pinging signs of life. 39% battery and dropping. What would happen if there was no more battery? How could I tell my new supervisor this news, that I had lost the baby after a mere few weeks?
The door to the operations and maintenance bus facility was locked, but I could see someone at the security desk through the glass doors. I knocked, and the person slowly emerged from their spaceship of a desk to open the door. A grey-haired man with a serene face peered at me. “How can I help you?”
In a torrent of words, I explained I had left my fragile baby of a phone on the bus and that it was still on that bus, and I needed it back most urgently. “Of course we’ll help you. Come on in,” he said. We were on the same page, my message received, and I got the feeling that he was a little energized at coming to the aid of a damsel in distress.
He disappeared to some back room and then re-emerged, a little long in the face. “You know — I worked at the Sheriff’s Office for years and so I know to ask someone their name. I know that. My boss is giving me hard time because I forgot.”
I laughed, because how often had I forgotten in the middle of the moment to pay attention to what I was supposed to. I gave him my information and he disappeared again, this time returning with his boss. The boss wanted to call the lost and found again, despite that I knew my phone was not there, it was here. He trotted off to make the fruitless call and he came back and said, “Alright, I’m going to check the buses. Can you make the phone ring?” I could.
The security guard and I were left in each other’s company, and he, it turned out, was happy for a little conversation. It must be lonely sitting at that desk all day; there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of foot traffic. He saw he had a captive audience, and so off he went telling his story.
After official retirement, he had taken a job doing security on the light rail, at his wife’s prompting. He needed things to do, to get out of the house. The light rail had been a little too rough. He had been physically threatened. That had been the end of that, when he should be enjoying his retirement, and that is why he now sat in front of me at the calm of his spaceship desk.
His story continued to flood out of him, of how one day on the train he had to call an ambulance for a little girl in medical distress. “She was just six years old,” he said, glad to have been the person to be in a position of help. But it had also been a place of moral dilemmas. While some security liked to tell people this was their train, and would yell to get off my train if someone happened not to have paid fare, he had been softer and kinder. “It’s not my train, you know?
I knew. Which is why we both found ourselves still battling it out in the places we no longer were, spaces we did not own but once occupied, and now these spaces had taken up permanent residence in our minds. I knew this story, and how sad it is to feel in some way like you are sitting it out, sidelined from a place where good and bad and right and wrong are not always so clear, where you can’t really be certain whether you are a person doing good or part of a system doing damage. His light rail train of six months before was my classroom of twenty years ago. Only two years of my life spent teaching public school and yet it occupies football fields of real estate in my imagination. I have also retreated to a calmer but less directly impactful desk job.
Our moment ended as his boss came bounding in, telling me I should buy a lottery ticket because there in his hand, improbably as far as he was concerned, was my slippery gray blue phone. It was only because he heard it ringing that he found it, he said, slipped into a crevice where it might have otherwise stayed for all eternity. I jumped up with the urge to hug the man but thought better of it and shook his hand.
So everything happens for a reason. Maybe. Almost everything. Or maybe only the things we remember to look for. When I got back to work, I realized I must have left my work phone back at the bus facility. I called it from my newly recovered work phone and the friendly security guard thankfully answered my call. “I saw it there and I couldn’t believe it! I thought no she didn’t! Again?!”
She did. When the boss came back with my work phone, I had apparently tossed my personal black phone aside in excitement. And there my black phone stayed on the black couch in the reception area as I walked out the door, pondering my incredible good luck.
Thirty minutes later, I found myself again rapping at the glass door of the bus facility. The security guard came and handed me the phone and said, shaking his head at this mess of a woman, “Well, thank you for the quality time.”
