Bag Gone - With Loss, a Lesson

My cell pinged a text. “Did you get my check?” the client asked.

I took down my big black bag where I kept my smaller green money bag with checks, cash and my personal identifiers.

Puzzlement. No green bag.That’s not right. 

I searched the highs and lows of the office, under the couch, in the file cabinet and atop the bookcase, despite knowing there’d be no way I’d placed the green bag in any of those places. This can't be. I always put the green in the black.  

In my car, parked outside my window, I turned over the floor mats, then to the seats and the cracks in the cushions where no bag could fit. Panic. 

Back to the office and the hallway. Did I somehow inadvertently drop it on the floor when I came inside? No, I had it when I came into my office. I had stepped-out for twenty minutes after I settled in, but locked everything. Did my bag disappear then?

Across the hallway and upstairs to the small businesses, I asked, “Have you guys by chance seen a green zipper bag with a bank logo on it?” 

Head shakes, “No. But we’ll keep a look out.”

Inside my office, I called my wife at home. “I’ll look around,” she said.

Later. “No, it’s not here. You took it with you, I’m sure.” 

Act quickly. I emailed my clients telling them the story. “You might want to put a stop order on your check,” I said, embarrassed that somehow this happened.

Monday afternoon, I was at my bank, getting a new account and a debit card. “It’s good you came in,” the bank manager told me. “These criminals scrub names off checks and add theirs.”  

Later that day, I was sitting in the social security department’s lobby to get my direct deposit routing number changed, given I’m a retiree. “It's a two hour wait today. Come back, or do it online,” a staff member there said.  

Tuesday, early, I was at the Motor Vehicle Department to get a new drivers license. 

As the week unfolded, I was becoming more and more certain someone had taken my bag in the few minutes I’d stepped out that Monday morning. “It’s an inside job,” my office associate claimed. 

Who was the ‘fuck’ who entered my office and took my bag. Will that person try to use my identity for some surreptitious or illegal activities? 

I’d called the police emphasizing I believed my bag was stolen. The officer was polite and professional, but I wasn’t holding my breath,  he'd turn up anything. 

There hadn’t been any suspicious persons hanging around the building that morning. And besides, who in the 

building would know how to unlock my office doors, then slip-in, grab a bag within a bag, and get out before I returned. A real stretch. 

My wife and I scoured the office again and again over the week, although we both knew we were panning for gold in a stream of pebbles. 

“Honey, I’m afraid it’s gone,” she said, consoling me. “But, this is all very strange.”

By the weekend I concluded no one was going to call and say, “ we found your bag.” 

This was a matter of crossing over the personal boundary lines.Then again, welcome to the world; I wasn’t immune from bad things happening. 

An aching brood.

I am more Deist than a Theist, meaning I believe in a higher power, but not in a God who is a puppet master. Nevertheless, I sent out a petitionary prayer, please let me find my bag. 

I took a telepathic approach and sent a message to the cosmos to the taker of my bag that he or she was committing bad karma.

Then late Saturday night, I got a call from a client whose dad had died suddenly. He wanted to talk. I don’t know what to do. How could that happen he said. 

On Youtube, I watched a broadcast of a man weeping over his family who lost their lives in a bomb blast. The backdrop of the broadcast showed children rummaging about in rubble and a little girl carrying a kitten.

A different perspective introduced itself. The gone bag had a relative significance, but not an absolute significance. My first lesson, but still a nagging need for more relief.

I goggled Bible verses, hoping for some insight into whether there was a lesson to be learned about my gone bag. Hardly, the old-school- way of studying the good book by thumbing through the pages.

The Bible teaches spiritual detachment from material possessions, an opening search noted. 

Psychologically, detaching from an emotional distress moves one from a fight, flight, freeze state to a parasympathetic state of rest and relaxation. Mindful breathing being one step toward that.  

Matthew 6:19-21 says people should not store up treasures on the earth where they can decay or get stolen, because a person’s heart follows where the treasure is.  

Ah, my attention certainly had been tuned to the treasures in my bag and to little else.

Still an echo, where’s my bag? 

The Stoics, pre Christian Greek philosophers, suggest to be aware of personal accountability for one’s actions; and also, understand that feelings regarding an event relate mostly to how one interprets the happening.   

Ultimately, my gone bag is missing because of me. It had a bold white lettering with my bank’s name on it. Who carries a bank bag around anyway, especially for carrying all his personal identifiers? I was an open target. 

A week after the bag’s disappearance, l began laying out my thoughts. 

Social psychologist, Dr. James Pennebaker, says handwriting pen-to- paper about troubles, lowers anxiety and builds resilience.

I cheated and pounded my thoughts into my Chrome which became this essay. I began to feel better.

In the past few days, contemplation about the case of the missing bag has turned towards the mystery of it all.Taking a Sherlock-approach allows me to be the observer of what happened. 

Was it an inside job? Was the bag taken by a passerby because it was somehow dropped? Or, did it disappear due to something beyond my understanding? 

In my mind I pictured perpetrators; the initial one, a young male. I became most incensed that some young punk broke into my office and took my bag.

But in a replay of that morning and of possible players, I concluded it was more likely a female. Strangely, my feelings of anger dissipated. I told myself perhaps she is a young, single mother who needed the cash. 

There’s little chance this mystery will be solved. Going forth, perhaps the best lesson about my bag gone south is, he who travels light, travels well.