Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

theft

Stolen {A series of S-words, Part 2}

I know I promised you a post on silence next in this series but things happen.

Like bicycles getting stolen.

If you’re following along, this would be incident #2 of a stolen bicycle. You can read all about the first one here.

This time around, it was our daughter’s bike that was taken, and while I’m less surprised that it happened, I’m still upset.

So angry, in fact, I wanted to give the world a big middle finger the day it happened. (I don’t mean to offend, but that was my honest feeling.)

A text from my husband alerted us to the missing bicycle, so our Friday morning, which had been going smoothly was thrown off-kilter. We searched the porch. I called in a police report. (“Yes, that was also us who reported a bicycle missing a month ago, thank you.) We dressed and took a walk up the road just to see if we could see any evidence of her bicycle in the general vicinity where my bike was found.

While waiting for my son to shower, I sat at the dining room table, choking down coffee, feeling like the world is a cruel place. Never mind that our president is threatening a nuclear war with North Korea. I was saddened by the feeling that we aren’t safe in our neighborhood, the one little corner of the world where we spend our daily life.

Our plan to ride the bus into the city and go to the library was delayed. When we finally headed out, it was an hour later than originally planned. And now we’d be eating lunch out.

At times like this, I want to curl up and hide out and cut off everyone and everything so there is no.more.hurt. My daughter, brave and strong thing that she is, has taken the news mostly with grace. She has not shed a tear, only asked if she has to use her birthday money to fix it when it comes back broken. Bless.

My anger does not surface often but when it does, look out. Just as quickly as my anger flares, though, tenderness invades. I want to be mad at the world and take my anger out on no one and everyone, but the only cure for my feelings is to stay open. To look for the good. To notice and see. To hold onto kindness when I’m on the receiving end of it.

Photo by Hanny Naibaho on Unsplash

The dispatcher groaned when I told her this was the second bike we had stolen in a month. The police officer said he was sorry this had happened again to us. They don’t have to show us kindness in the midst of their jobs but they did.

A bike was stolen. It is important. But there are more important things to protect.

—

The world tried to break me as we traveled into the city.

We sat on the bus listening to a mom in the back row tell her young child over and over again to “Stop!” He had already pulled the cord to signal the bus to stop even though they weren’t stopping, and she was irritated. My mind was still full of the black thoughts from our morning discovery, but I tried to get to a happier place. I have been that mom. I am that mom.

“That’s a college, too,” she said to the boy as we passed the school of technology. We had already been through the community college. “That’s the college Mommy was going to go to.” Just a hint of sadness in her voice.

My thoughts turned immediately to my own mother, who gave up college when she learned she was pregnant with me. I have no evidence that this mom abandoned college for the same reasons, but I wondered.

A few blocks later, we passed the county prison which is unimpressive on the back side but looks like a castle from the front.

“Your uncle is in there,” the woman said. I can only assume the boy waved because he said he could see his uncle. His mom explained that his uncle can’t see him, and the weight of these circumstances is heavy in my heart.

Sadness settles in and it’s all I can feel and see. As we drive through the city, I think of my uncle, a bus driver, who died too soon. I notice all the people sitting on their porches smoking in the middle of the day. What are they feeling? Have they lost hope?

The world is broken. And it is breaking me.

This is one thing a bike thief can’t take from me. Stealing from us only increases my awareness of the hurt of others. When I feel pain, I feel others’ pain, too. Suffering of any kind, as much as I don’t want it to happen, helps me see more clearly.

—

Later, we go to Target and are maybe the only family who is not shopping for school supplies. I am speaking in unkind tones to my children who are bouncing through the aisles and sharing eleventy-billion thoughts, including “Whoa. That guy’s beard is cool.”

I don’t even look because we live in a town with a lot of beards. Also, I have a husband with a beard, and I’m not in the mood to be impressed. But they keep.bringing.it.up. I’m just trying to get through Target without spending all our money or losing my s*** so we can pick up my husband from work and go home to eat BLTs for dinner. (Bacon, apparently, is a comfort food.)

We stand in line at the checkout and then I see it. The beard. It’s striped. Orange and black. And it’s on a Target employee. He leans toward our aisle to restock some snacks and I see the full picture: orange and black beard, significant nose ring.

“My kids like your beard,” I say because I feel like I have to say something if I’m staring.

“Thanks,” he says. “I’m rather fond of it, too.”

It feels small, this acknowledgement of another’s humanity, especially when it looks different than my own, but it was big enough to crack the darkness a little more.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

I’m not always good at this getting outside of my head thing, so I felt good that this was another thing the bike incident didn’t take from me. I can still offer kind words and a smile to someone else.

On our way back into the city, while stopped in traffic, there was a woman sitting in the median with a sign I could not read. My first thought was “Crap, I don’t have any cash or extra food.” We had just been to Target, of course, but what we had were groceries, not food we could easily give away. She was feet from a grocery store but we were running behind. My intentions are almost always better than my actions in these situations, and as we passed, I read that she was asking for shoes. The only shoes I had were the ones on my feet and they aren’t in that great of condition.

I glanced in the mirror as we drove away and saw another car pull up next to her and hand her something of significant size out the window. I want to believe it was shoes. Or a hot meal. It definitely wasn’t cash.

Witnessing the act softened my heart even more because sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one feeling anything at all for people on the street. I watch more people walk by than stop, and I myself walk by more often than I stop. So, to see someone else do something good encourages me that making a difference, changing the world, showing kindness, is not all on just one of us. It’s on all of us.

This thievery makes me suspicious of the people I see in my neighborhood but seeing strangers do nice things, talking to new people at Target, this reminds me that the human connection is strong and it takes work to keep it that way.

It is much harder to take a step toward knowing someone than it is to judge them from afar. It is harder to show kindness, to want to understand the motives behind an action, than to decide a person’s guilt on the spot.

I want to do the hard things. (Okay, I mostly want to do hard things. I also want to watch Netflix and forget about life for a while.) I even have this wild idea to invite the thieves over for dinner so we can know them better. They have not stolen my hope for a better way to life.

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

—

A final few words.

“Stolen” doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. We talk about our hearts being stolen by a lover or a child. We say things like “let’s steal away to the beach for a day” and it’s a glorious feeling of freedom. Or if we find a good deal on something, it’s a “steal” and we pat ourselves on the back.

Things, people–they might be taken from us by some person or circumstance, but only we can decide what will ultimately be stolen in the process.

Will a bicycle theft also steal my joy for life? Will it steal my hope that we might move to the city and live in closer proximity to people who might take things from us? Will it steal my compassion?

Or will my heart be stolen by a better, harder way of life?

What I don’t want to feel

I’m sitting on the porch as I write this, a cool and gentle breeze wrapping around the wrap-around porch, my kids yelling at each other in the driveway as they “play” (God bless summer). I am shaded from the sun and able to enjoy being outside without suffering the heat and humidity of the past week.

The porch is my favorite place. For writing. For reading. For sipping coffee in the morning. For taking a break in the afternoon when I’ve dedicated the morning to the housework that I hate.

But this sanctuary was violated. And now I have to fight the fear that I don’t want to feel.

—

On Friday morning, on our way out the door to catch the bus to downtown, the kids raised the alarm.

“Mom, where’s your bike?”

I turned to the spot on the porch by the door through which we enter the house and sure enough, my bicycle was missing. People describe it as a “sinking feeling” and it’s totally true. Like an anchor had been dropped into my stomach. We only had a few minutes before we needed to meet the bus, so I did a quick scan of the porch to see if anything else was missing.

It wasn’t.

I texted my husband, who leaves for work in the pre-dawn hours, to ask if he had seen it. I tried to rationalize the circumstances. Maybe, on a whim, he decided to load the bike in the van in the middle of the night and take it for a tune-up. Even as I write, this makes no sense, but it was a much more desirable scenario than what had actually happened.

My bicycle had been stolen.

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

We went about our day with friends and my husband assured me he had not seen the bicycle and could not remember if it was there when he left for work or not. He encouraged me to file a police report, which I vowed to do later in the day. It was not a storm cloud over our day, more like a slight overcast. As we lunched with friends and hung out in the city, my mind kept returning to the porch and the feeling that we were not safe and neither was our stuff.

I wanted to beat myself up for not having a lock on the bike, for not paying closer to attention to details. I tried to laugh it off–it’s taken four years of living in this place for us to have something stolen, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before now! I wanted to believe the best about someone. Maybe they needed it for work or to get groceries or some other worthy reason.

I visited all of these emotions because of the one thing I don’t want to be: afraid.

—

As we drove home later that day, I found my eyes drawn to anyone on a bicycle. To the sides of the road where it might be lying abandoned. The police officer who filed the report said I should drive through the neighborhoods and look for it in someone’s yard. His first point of blame was the kids from the nearby apartments. (The same kids who last year were drawn to our garden and its bounty of food.)

Now I am eyeing my neighbors with suspicion. Every person who walks past our house is a suspect. I am harboring anger that someone would be so bold as to walk up to our porch and practically into our house to take something that does not belong to them.

I AM afraid. Afraid that someone has been watching our comings and goings. That someone knows when we sleep and when we rise. I am afraid they will come back and take something else or that I will accidentally catch someone in the act of thieving and someone will come to harm because of it.

Most of all, though, I am afraid of being afraid. I know what happens when fear is in control. I circle the wagons, build the walls around my heart, and refuse to trust my fellow man. I look at people not like me with suspicion. I fuel the stereotypes instead of fight them. I assume the worst in people. I adopt a posture of protection.

—

Yesterday, on our way home from a short hike through a beautiful woods in the middle of town, I was scanning the neighborhood again when I caught a glimpse of handlebars in a grassy area next to a sidewalk.

“There’s a bike over there!” I yelled. We pulled into our driveway and my husband walked the short distance to investigate. The kids wanted to go with him but we told them to stay put so they watched from the porch. A minute or two later, my husband returned with my bike on his shoulders. The back wheel was bent and dented, rendering the bike useless to whomever had taken it, I guess.

I let slip a word I try not to say in front of my kids then apologized. I left a message for the police officer with whom I had filed the report and I wondered if the insurance claim would be necessary after all. As I sat on the porch that afternoon, my mind found some dark places. I mentally called the “kids” who had taken my bike all kinds of names, the most mild of which was “punks.” I imagined encountering them in person and being angry, yelling at them for their lack of disrespect for someone else’s property.

I am furious that I now have to fix something that I didn’t even break.

I wondered how you bend the back tire without the rest of the bike being damaged. My dad suggested that someone was jumping it off of something high and landing hard. This, too, puts me in a rage. They broke my bike FOR FUN and will probably never have to pay the consequences for it.

Life is not fair.

—

It is not wrong to want to feel safe. Or be safe. It is wrong to worship safety or let the pursuit of safety be our primary aim in life. Guaranteed safety is unachievable. That might be frightening or it might be liberating.

A few days before my bike was stolen, I wrote a blog post about how terrible and wonderful the world can be. I almost laughed at the timing of the theft because now I had more life experience on which to draw. The same day my bicycle was taken and my sense of safety threatened, the kids and I had lunch with friends from out-of-town, took a food tour with more friends, and spent an evening poolside with yet a third set of friends. Our day was full of goodness with a blip of unpleasantness.

There was a time when the one “bad” part of the day would have ruined the rest of it for me. I could decide not to sit on my porch anymore because the idea of someone invading it is too unsettling. I could decide to lock up everything we own, to never leave the house anymore, to get a security system or leave the porch light on all night every night. I could choose all sorts of reactions to this event.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

Before we found the bike, I had resolved to be tender about the whole thing, taking each next step as it came: police report, insurance claim, vigilance. I was surprised by how easy it was to throw all of those feelings aside when the resolution was not to my liking. Sure, we got my bike back, but it’s broken and for what? It is almost natural, these feelings of anger and hatred toward some person or people I don’t know who have wronged me.

This, too, I must fight with everything I have.

I still need to feel the disappointment of putting a family bike ride on hold. And I can be angry and upset about the condition of my bike. But I must keep my heart open because it is the way I want to live.

Fear is like a weed that wants to overtake the garden of my soul and I will yank it out again and again until it knows it is not welcome here. I could say the same for the kind of anger that leads to meanness or hatred.

These emotions will not be the boss of me any more than safety will be my ultimate goal.

I am choosing to love despite this small inconvenience.

It is not and will not be easy.

But it will be good.

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