Today my wallet was stolen for the 400th time, and frankly I’m sick of it. I don’t know what bothers me more – the crime or the fact that the thief always sneaks back into my home an hour later and puts the wallet back in a hard-to-find place such as the top of my dresser.
There’s never anything missing from the wallet, so I know the thief isn’t especially good at his job. It might be the same idiot who keeps stealing my car every time I park it at the airport. He always refills the gas tank and parks it somewhere in the general vicinity of where I know I left it, but still it’s rude and unsettling.
My parents are having a similar problem. They spend winters at their little townhouse in Florida, and this year when they came down from New York my Dad noticed that something was terribly wrong. As he explained it, there “wasn’t enough dust on the furniture.” After six months, you expect a good layer, enough to leave your initials. But this year, suspiciously, there was almost no dust at all.
My Dad could have investigated in a scientific manner, such as checking the Farmer’s Almanac to see if it was supposed to be an especially dustless year. But why bother when you know the house has been invaded by people who dust your stuff without asking?
The worst of the home invading pranksters is the one who keeps screwing with my laundry. It’s always the same stupid trick and I am not amused. It works like this: I return to my closet with a warm basket of freshly laundered clothes, only to notice one sock on the floor halfway between the clean laundry in my arms and the hamper from whence it came. Now I have to ask myself, is that a clean sock that just now fell from my basket, or is it a dirty sock that fell an hour ago when I was taking the dirty stuff from the hamper?
I know the prankster is hiding somewhere in the closet, watching as I inspect the sock, checking for radiant heat, flexibility and freshness. I sniff it, give it the dangle test (to see if it is still shaped like a foot) and then make my decision. I’m never entirely comfortable that I made the right one. That’s why I often walk with a slight limp, just so I don’t spend so much time putting weight on what might be a dirty sock.