my 'duh' moment

My car was burgled. Why? Because as I was gathering up children and the various bags that go with them in the aim of ushering them into childcare so that I could make my shift at a part-time summer job on Saturday morning, I decided that my purse was one bag too many and left it on the floor of the passenger side of the car. It wasn't glinting in the sunlight of the front seat, but it wasn't exactly obscured from vision either. So there it was. Not long after my shift started, a patron came to the front desk of the establishment where I work and said he thought his car had been broken into, but he couldn't be sure and called the police. I looked at the other girls I work with, they nodded, and I went outside to check on the fate of my purse. At first glance, all looked normal--no broken windows, everything was still locked.

But my purse was gone. Later, after I gave my statement to the policer officer, he showed me what I had overlooked.

The thieves had pried up the handle and shoved something into the keyhole.

Mostly I wrote this as a cautionary tale: pick up your purse even when you don't think you have enough time or hands. However there are some interesting yet creepy details that were to surface a few hours later in the day. At about two-thirty in the afternoon, one of my neighbors rang our doorbell. My husband let her in and she handed him four purses, one of them mine and another stuffed with all the cards, receipts and ID's she and her daughter had picked up from where they had been strewn in the ditch near the entrance of my neighborhood. My neighborhood is about 17 miles from my part-time job, which means, yikes, the bad guys had cased our house. After sifting through the mess, we determined that ALL OF MY STUFF including my debit card, credit cards, drivers license and passport were there, but between the other three purses there was only one receipt for one lady and a couple of store-specific credit cards belonging to another. We found out later that the lady with the receipt had also had all of her important documentation in her purse including her green card because she had just started a new job and had brought it all in so personnel could make copies and take the numbers. She didn't get any of those things back. Of course, I've watched one too many episodes of CSI and have lots of theories about everything that has happened. When I called my sister-in-law, a police officer up until recently when she became a mom, to tell her all my theories, she listened sweetly and then said, "You know, Jen, it's usually all just a series of random coincidences." Yes, right, I knew that.