Car Theft-- Or Lack Thereof

Last night as we were driving to meet some friends for dinner, Ben made a discovery. "Adele," he asked, "Did you pull out all of the stuff from the glove compartment and leave it on the seat?" I thought for a second, and no, I had not. "Did you leave the glove compartment open?" Again, nope. "How about the armrest storage?" Nope. "Well, I think someone went through our car last night."

Now, I'll be totally honest: I rarely lock our car. First off, it's not much to look at, so I figure that no one would want to steal it. Also, I think I just have too much trust for other people-- in college, I never locked my bike up, and it got stolen... and then my next bike got stolen too (you must be thinking, "does this girl never learn?? I guess I do but just slowly ;-). And there's the fact that without that automatic locking thing that newfangled cars have, arriving at an unlocked car with a toddler on my hip tends to make life way easier. So, anyway, the car was open, and someone had gone through it.

We started taking inventory of all of our things: our small, low-tech gps, still in the glove compartment; my cheapo cell phone, still in the console; my knock-off sunglasses, still in the side-compartment. It took moments to realize that whoever went through our car found nothing worthy of stealing. Everything was still there.

While you all might imagine that my main emotion was relief or thankfulness, I'll tell you the truth. I was sort of wounded. Was none of our stuff theft-worthy? Come on, there were plenty of valuable things in our car! How could you not want the baby seat? Or my phone? Come to think of it, we haven't checked the trunk yet-- maybe the thief made off with a rayon scarf, some dog toys, and a snow scraper. I'll go out and check-- and try to remember my keys, because the car is locked today, thank you very much.