Rocketship Underpants

photo by John Mealy

I have a strange story to tell you. This story really starts three years ago when John and I walked into a big-box electronics store. We pointed to a couple of shiny cameras, sacrificed our savings accounts, and drove home to snap pictures of our feet. A year later I browsed through the lengthy reading material that had come with my accidental warranty while I held my beloved, and dead, little point-and-shoot. Because they didn’t have the same model in stock, the store sent me a gift card for the full amount paid, minus the price of the warranty.

When I walked into the big-box electronics store with my gift card I expected to pay more for an upgrade, but I found that prices for the type of camera I was looking at had dropped considerably. I handed over my gift card and they wrote me out a new accidental warranty. I lept on my new toy, delighted at my resourcefulness, enamored with my new set of manual controls.

Then a few months later, within weeks of each other, two things happened:

My camera disappeared.

And that store went out of business.

For lack of any religious or karmic beliefs I simply called it poetic justice. Nothing is truly free. John and I looked for my camera. We peeked under every book, behind every piece of furniture. I found out how much I could actually fold and flip the seats in my car. Nothing. For weeks. Then months. And we’d looked everywhere.  So, I went on without a camera. I gave up. I started looking at new cameras, counting the months until I could afford any of them, which would be long after my bank account recovered from grad school applications and our trip to Peru. Still. I wanted one. Bad. I complained about its absence.

And then, this morning, as we were throwing on our coats and grabbing our hiking backpacks to leave for the day, John walked up to a shelf and pulled my camera off it. He handed it to me and we stood there, silent. The shelf where he found it is in the middle of our living room. Just a couple of months ago I walked over there and looked around, joking that I thought I just might find my camera there. Here it was. I turned it on. The battery was full, my old pictures loaded right up.

“That’s amazing!” I said. “And really creepy.”

“Very,” John said.

We stared at that shelf, the one we see multiple times a day as we hang up our coats, as we walk to the bathroom.

“Is, is it possible that we somehow just overlooked…”

“No.” John said.

“Yeah.”

And that’s it. We’ll probably never know why it left and how it returned. I’m thrilled to have it again. Thrilled. And curious.