Going on Automatic

It was a dumb thing to do. When I pulled into my apartment parking lot and realized my purse was missing I knew exactly what had happened because I had done the exact same thing last time I was at the grocery store. The only explanation I can come up with is that I developed a glitch in my automatic pilot. This has happened before. Last week, in fact, I was driving home along the same route I’d traveled for five months and I completely missed the turn onto my street. Didn’t even notice I had missed it until several blocks later when my automatic pilot realized something was wrong and consciousness kicked in. When the same thing happened the very next day, I decided that my automatic pilot had somehow lost a step in the process and that I’d better start paying attention to my driving again until the step was re-ingrained into my mind.

So that’s what I’m going to attribute the loss of my purse to—another glitch in my automatic pilot. Nearly seven years of grocery shopping has made the routine fairly automatic—open my car trunk, load in the groceries, close the trunk, loop my purse around my arm, push the cart into the nearest holding pen, return to my car and toss the purse on the floor or the seat. Sometime within the last week my automatic pilot lost the part about looping my purse around my arm and so twice now my purse has been left sitting in the front of the grocery cart while I have driven off.

The first time this happened I noticed fairly quickly and returned just as one of the cart collectors was turning the purse in at the service desk. Yesterday I didn’t realize that my purse was still back at the Kroger until I got home. Annoyed at myself for making the same dumb mistake twice in a row, I turned around and drove back to Kroger. My shopping cart was no longer in the holding pen, and I went inside and waited fifteen frustrating minutes at the service desk to learn that no one had turned in a purse this time. I came back home, then called Kroger to leave my name and phone number in case the purse turned up, and then called my wise mother because she still knows more about what to do in a minor crisis than I do. And also because I was upset and knew that she could give me the appropriate sympathy.

A few minutes later I was making calls and canceling credit cards and debit cards. Really, I only use one credit card and one debit card from one bank, but I had also opened up a local account, and I have a couple credit cards that I applied for at some time or another so that I could get a discount on a purchase. As I called and reported my cards lost or stolen, I also started to make a mental tally of everything else that had been in my purse. Library cards, discount cards, driver’s license, a receipt that I needed to get reimbursed for a purchase for the ward choir, my passport (which I forgot to remove after my failed trip to New York via Canada in November), about $50 in cash. Really, it might have been better to make a list of what was not in my purse—the stamps that I usually keep in my wallet because otherwise I forget where I put them, my student ID, my Ann Arbor library card, my social security card.

But surprisingly, I’m not really upset. It’s an inconvenience, and I lost $50, and I’m going to have to pay for a new driver’s license (I was hoping I could wait on that one). But there’s nothing I can do about it and so I’ll deal with it.

And things aren’t all bad. Last night I traveled up to Canton, to the home of a friend in the ward (well, my roommate’s friend, actually) where her mother (who is Palestinian) taught us how to make stuffed grape leaves—yum. My hands still smell like garlic from handling the filling and rolling the leaves, and we didn’t eat until well after nine because they take a long time to prepare and an even longer time to cook. But it was worth it. My roommate intends to return for more cooking lessons and I think I’d like to come along—middle eastern cuisine is a relatively recent culinary discovery for me, and although I don’t know that I will ever try to make stuffed grape leaves on my own, it’s still fun to learn. And to eat, of course.