21-Sandwich board heist is trying to tell me something?



Stolen board, left, shown in better days.  Offending photo hanging.



This week a sandwich board I’ve had outside my office on a fairly busy residential street was stolen.  I showed up for work and it was gone.


I am not laboring under the misimpression that someone stole this in order to have a poster with a photo of yours truly.  Come to think of it, maybe someone stole it because they were sick of driving up and down the street seeing that photo of yours truly!  “Take it down, lady!” they may be saying, “please!  I can’t stand it anymore!” 

Most likely, it was taken to re-use the board itself.

Stupid me, you are saying, not to have brought it inside like the neighboring insurance agent does with his (insurance agent should know about theft, right?).  But I didn’t want to do that.  More people drive by and see my ad in the longer evening daylight.

So I gambled and lost $250 or so worth of the board and signs stuck to it.

It’s not coming back, like the Adirondack chair which was heisted last October in what I assume was a drunken college homecoming stunt or dare.  It showed up a couple months later after I posted a sign outside and got some Facebook publicity and it was clear my one remaining chair was lonely.

Losing something, or having something stolen, is an icky feeling in the pit of your stomach.

But over the years, I have been naively trusting and unusually lucky.  About the worst thing I can recall being stolen was a pair of beloved flip flops I had foolishly left in a sand dune just off a path going down to a Lake Superior beach because I didn’t want to wear them in deep sand and figured I’d pick them up later.  Instead, someone else did.  The only thing that ticked me off was that the path ran through the property of a church.  Whoever took them had to walk by the church on the way out with flipflops that weren’t theirs.

Last summer, two high school friends and I stopped in the only store in Eagle River, Michigan, for an ice cream cone.  I was totally absorbed in my Zanzibar Chocolate and the conversation we were having with a couple who was biking the Keweenaw Peninsula.  I drove off without my purse.  Just got up, got in the car, and left it sitting on the steps with credit cards, cash, driver’s license, phone.  At the next stop, eight miles down the road, I realized it and went back. 

“It’s on the counter,” a woman across the street shouted when she saw me drive up.  Apparently everyone in or outside the store had a discussion about how long before I would be back.  Everything was still in there.

About 16 years ago, someone returned our misplaced camera to lost-and-found in Disneyland.  It really was the happiest place on earth.

I have been the happy recipient of some other people’s lost things.  I found a really great pair of winter gloves in the intersection of Larpenteur and Snelling Avenues in St. Paul one winter probably 20 years ago.  I am sure someone had placed them on their roof and loaded the car and forgot them.  I know that, because I have done that with, say, a coffee cup.  They weren’t coming back for their gloves.  I pulled over and retrieved them, washed them out and enjoyed them for years. 

Mitten/glove karma does not count, however.  I lost my currently favorite pair this winter.  I have no idea where I left them.  Every year,  or every other year, some go, some show up.  This was more true when the boys were little.  I am not beneath picking up a single glove or mitten in a parking lot and adding it at home to the washed-out-good-as-new box of singles.  Mismatched doesn’t matter when it’s 40 below or your first pair is wet.

I stopped doing that when the boys were old enough to exclaim, “MOM!” and look worried that someone would see their mother effectively parking-lot dumpster diving.

Now that they are so old that they don’t go hardly anywhere with me anymore, I do it again.

And speaking of dumpster diving, a college friend once took us dumpster diving behind a St. Vincent DePaul store whose location shall remain secret.  He found a down vest in excellent condition.  Amazing what some people, and some thrift stores, throw out.



Really, is that so bad?

Anyhow, I have re-ordered my sandwich board. 

When it shows up, I will not chain it to my building, nor will I bring it in at night this summer.

I am rolling the dice, and if my number is up, it’s up.  I am aware that my mid-size Upper Midwestern town is not Mayberry.  But I also do not choose to live in fear.

If it happens again, maybe it really is about the picture, and I’ll try a third time with photo removed!