My husband simply cannot stand for me to do something without him joining me in the experience.
If I get a speeding ticket driving around town, he gets a speeding ticket driving out of town. I have a fender bender, he crunches his van. I clean my car, he polishes his.
So why was I surprised last week when he lost his wallet?
After all, I had lost mine a week or two before that. I stopped by the grocery store on my way to work, pulled out my wallet to pay the clerk and went on to work. I did not leave the office, did not go anywhere in my car until I prepared to leave the office that afternoon. I decided that the billfold fell out of a too-shallow coat pocket, was picked up, searched for my non-existent cash and trashed. I could be wrong. Whatever happened, I could not find my green wallet. I looked through my desk, under my desk and under all the seats in the car and under the car. I looked in the trunk of the car. I stopped at the grocery store. No green wallet nestled in their lost and found drawer. I had lost it.
I went home and dutifully called the credit card companies and tried to remember all the correct answers to the “proof of identity” questions. The credit counselor assured me no one had tried to use the cards. She also told me how much money someone could have used if my wallet had been found before I called in the cards. I never would voluntarily be that generous with a total stranger.
I trudged over to my bank. My friend works there. She assured the man helping me that I was myself and then the man and I had a lengthy session disabling the previous ATM card, signing for another and putting a hold on checks I knew I had not used. It took a lot longer than I thought it would.
I drove below the speed limit to the licensing bureau, feeling naked and vulnerable without a driver’s license. Of course, I did not think about bringing another form of ID. So, of course, I had to drive back home, grab my passport and return to the bureau. The clerk did save me time next year, as she let me renew my license a year early.
Fortunately, I tend to keep my wallet contents to a minimum. I did not have more than a couple of dollars in cash, a library card, a couple of checks and two magic money cards.
I found the previously lost library card a couple of days after I lost my wallet. I guess they just exchanged places in the land of the lost. The library aide accepted it and re-entered the old number.
I pulled a spare wallet off my shelf of back-up items and settled down to spending money again.
I thought that was the end of it. But no, my mirror image could not stand missing out on the fun.
Within the week, he called me at work to say he could not find his wallet. He listed all the places he had looked for it. He knew he had used it at a fast food place he visited before he went home. He checked, they did not have any wallet. He cleaned out his car and turned the house upside down looking for the thing.
He speculates that he dropped his wallet inside the fast food bag and tossed it into the trash. Who knows? Maybe he did. The wallet is gone. The next couple of days he literally followed my trail around town.
He visited the licensing bureau twice because he also needed identification. I had failed to share that part of my experience with him. So he also went had to go home, grab his passport and use that to replace his license. (The bureau offers several other methods of identification. We just knew where to find our passports.)
At the bank when he asked my friend to verify his identity and added, “I never said a word to her about losing her wallet.”
Good, because he for sure would have had to eat his words a week later. The only thing he did differently was he asked for next-day delivery of his credit card and he decided to wait on the postman to deliver him an embossed numbers bank card to use at the ATM machine.
As always, we keep a balance on things around here. He could not say anything about my negligence, and I could not say a thing about his.
My husband’s replacement adventure will take more time. He lost a fat wallet filled with business cards, a fishing license, his gold card to visit national parks, a couple of gift cards (that money will never be replaced) and other miscellaneous. His lost wallet needed to lose a few things – instead it lost itself. He bought another small folding wallet, slid in his new credit card and driver’s license into place and began accumulating business cards and other odds and ends just in case he ever needs them.
Now if the two of us are done with that game I am sure there are plenty of other, less expensive ways that we can share experiences.
(Joan Hershberger is a staff writer at the News-Times. Email her at joanh@everybody.org)