Extra glasses
The ticket-seller at the Metra station just came out of his booth to hand me the sunglasses that I dropped in the parking lot, on Friday morning. His cryptic smile combined with the weird nod the coffee-guy gave me lead me to believe that they probably watched me on Friday, as I casually started walking across the parking lot, then saw the early train start rolling into the station, started running, thinking I might be able to catch it and have some extra time to pick up a coffee while walking to work after the trains, slung my bag around from back to front to grab my wallet to pay for parking (which is probably when my sunglasses flew out of the not-quite-closed pocket that they were in), punched in my number and waited for the machine to register my payment, then whipped around the corner to see the conductor get on and close the doors.
I want to believe the coffee-guy saw me running, because, clearly, his job is boring that early in the morning, and seeing someone run for a train is exciting. I even want to believe that he saw my glasses fly out of my bag and turned them into the ticket-guy. I’d also love to stretch the reality a bit and imagine that he thought about approaching me between the early train that I missed and my regular train to tell me something flew out of my bag, but decided not to, because I looked like Bruce Banner about to go hulk. The actual reality is probably that someone turned them in when they saw them in the parking lot and the ticket-seller just knew they were mine, somehow, and has a weird smile all the time… and coffee-guy gives a nod to anyone he thinks might buy from him again.
Whatever really happened, I now have a spare pair of sunglasses, since I went to lenscrafters on Saturday. I also have a spare pair of regular glasses from the Friday that they fell out of my pocket when the school bus that I was in jumped a curb. Those came back in the middle of the next week, in the same case that these sunglasses came back in… the one with the broken zipper-pull, maybe it’s a lucky case. But again, they didn’t quite come back fast enough for me not to replace them.
It’s weird to have spares for both, but I don’t think I should return either pair, knowing my luck and given the worn out condition of the 4-5 year old pairs that tried to get away.