Dearest Rachel –
There are some stories that are not really mine to tell, as I don’t enter into them until the second or third act at best, but since Daniel’s not likely to tell it (for various reasons, including that he’s not a writer, as such, and it’s debatable as to how well the story would reflect on him), I might as well tell at least my part of it, especially since I managed to bring it to a (happy) conclusion. Not without his input, I should add, but you’ll see as things unfold.
Upon being dropped off by Roland yesterday, I settled into my usual place in the house; watching videos from my seat in the bedroom. It’s a quiet, mundane existence, the perfect way to recover from the day I’d just come home from. I don’t have to think, I don’t have to move, I don’t have to do anything. It may not be the ideal way to spend an entire day (and yet I do so far too often), but it’s great for unwinding after a busy one.
Of course, the boys were busy in the family room, watching something that I think appeals much more to Logan than Daniel (for my part, I’m getting sick of hearing one character or another threatening to send another “to the shadow realm”; it’s a stupid euphemism, and at that level of repetition, it gets grating fast). At some point, Daniel came by, asking for the password for our shared Apple account. I looked it up for him, but as he left, I wondered why he’d even asked, as he had the password more or less embedded in his phone already.
Well, after Logan headed off to his bedroom, and Daniel came around to spend time with me at the end of my evening, I learned a little bit more of the story. It turned out that in my absence, he went out to get his weekly lunch from the smoothie cafe and sandwich shop a couple of doors apart from each other in an outbuilding on “the triangle.” When he returned, he couldn’t find his phone. He claimed to have looked through the car, and he definitely returned to both of the establishments he visited to try and find it, all with no success. The reason he’d asked me for the password was to hopefully try to access the “Find It” function on his phone, but to no avail.
It was at that point that I mentioned that we’d never set up our phones to be able to find each other. I have the app, but at present, it only works for me to find Lars’ phone, and I think Kevin’s (not that that matters anymore); not Daniel’s. So it wouldn’t be able to help him, anyway.
I did offer him a phone I’d been sent, allegedly from AT&T several months ago (I made the mistake of answering what may have been a spam call that only listed itself as being from town, and when the caller offered me a discount on my phone bill, I acquiesced, against my better judgement. After the fifth attempt of his to use the dual verification feature, I hung up, but apparently the process was already initiated by then). I figured that, if the worst had happened, we had a replacement that we could put into use almost immediately, if need be. It wasn’t ideal – Daniel didn’t want a new phone, any more than he ever wants a new anything – but if it was gone, we would need to start over, and at least we had the hardware to do so. All we’d have to do was to show up at the store and see if we couldn’t get everything downloaded from the cloud to create a reasonable replacement.
He wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but he took it, still in its box, and let me prepare for bed. I tried to remember that you would often pray about such lost items, and once I was lying there in the dark, asked for something between a miracle (which, while I hate to box Him in by saying He doesn’t deal in them these days, don’t seem to be all that common) and equanimity, throwing in a little bit of gratitude for my idiocy at answering that spam call actually working out for some good, after all. There wasn’t much else to be done about the situation at that point.
There wasn’t much that could be done about it first thing this morning, either, as I had to get my car in for routine service that I’d scheduled a week or so back. Still, as I was on my way out, I checked into the family room, and much to my surprise, Daniel was awake; still trying to find out if his missing phone had been used by anyone (and determining that, thankfully, it had not). He asked if I would check the car on my way out, which surprised me, as I don’t keep a copy of your keys these days, honey; they’re in his care, since he drives it.
“Oh, I took your car while you were out.”
Under other circumstances, I might have been a little annoyed, but at this point, if I’m not using it, I don’t see why he can’t. After all, it’s the car he passed his driver’s test in, so he can be trusted with it. I guess I just wasn’t expecting him to be using it.
In any event, I promised that I would, particularly since he acknowledge not having looked under the seats – which only makes sense insofar that he’s as tall as he is, since the SUV is high enough up that bending down to do so isn’t that hard for me. So I looked when I got outside… and there, visible only from the seat behind the driver, wedged between the seat and the console, I spotted a wedge of blue plastic.
His phone had been there all night last night.
It needed charging (at least from my perspective, since I don’t like it when mine falls below ninety or eighty percent charge), but otherwise, it was in perfect shape. I won’t go so far as to call it a miracle, but this was an answer to prayer, as your old rules would have called for, so with a quick ‘thank you’ (because I still had to make my appointment) I brought it inside for him to tend to. He wasn’t gushing with thanks for it, but at the same time, he hadn’t been panicking over its absence either, the way I would have been in a similar situation. But he was appreciative, albeit with a bit of wonder as to how it could have been found in a spot he was sure he’d checked previously.
Then again, this just happened with his social security card, not all that long ago, too. Maybe we just need to check those gaps on a regular basis going forward.
Letters to Rachel 