Lost and Found

I've lived in my little town (eagerly awaiting the 2010 census figures, but the 2000 census put us at a little over 5000) for 22 years next month. There are some drawbacks--all the obvious ones--lack of culture, having to drive ridiculously far to shop for anything other than the basics, people minding each other's business a little too much, people a little too conservative (both politically and socially) for my taste--but...practically every day something happens here to remind me why I continue to overlook those issues.

The drive-up ATM at my bank is the kind that retains the card throughout your transaction only spitting it out at the end after it prints the receipt. Most of the rest of the ones I've used recently are the swipe kind or "insert card and remove quickly" types so in the year or so since I've been using this ATM, despite the helpful "Please take your card" message on the screen, I have several times driven away without my card. The ATM is designed with a feature that takes absent-mindedness into consideration and sucks the card back in after half a minute or so, preventing it from being swiped by the next person in line. Theoretically.

When I drove off without my card the other day (when the bank was closed) and realized it within ten minutes, I was irritated with myself and not-so-eagerly anticipating the Walk of Shame at the bank the next day. I was calculating whether this was the third or fourth time I had committed this particular idiocy--shame compounds exponentially so the difference between third time shame and fourth time shame is considerable--when Daughter-Only texted me: "DG has your debit card."

DG is a guy who is peripherally in Daughter-Only's life--they have lots of mutual friends and often end up hanging out in the same place but don't spend much time one-on-one with each other. While I was mentally beating myself up for driving off again, Daughter-Only had received a text from DG asking what her mother's name was. DG then told her that he had my debit card and would bring it to school the next day. We assumed DG had come in line after me at the ATM and retrieved my not-yet-sucked-in card and DG was unavailable to clarify because he was at work.

The next day, when he returned the card, he told Daughter-Only that "some guy" had actually been behind me in line and had remembered that he had seen Daughter-Only with DG and knew he would know how to get the card back to me so he had dropped it off at DG's house. Who this guy was or how he knew Daughter-Only's last name has not been satisfactorily explained but the point is that there are WAY fewer than six-degrees of separation* between people in a small town and, most of the time, I like it that way.

*Yes that's a wide-open opportunity for an incest joke--but come on, it's way too predictable to be funny.