The day before classes started at Eastern New Mexico University for the fall 1984 semester, I planned to do a little driving early in the morning. I went outside Lincoln Hall and discovered I couldn't find my car. I usually parked it on the street on the west side of the building, but it wasn't there. I looked in the parking lot. I didn't park it there, either. All of a sudden, I realized my car must have been stolen.
I went to the University Police to file a report. They drove me around campus to see if I could find it. I saw another car that looked like my 1972 Pontiac LeMans Sport, but it clearly wasn't my car. (Mine was actually in better condition.) We didn't see it anywhere, so a report was filed and sent to the Portales Police Department. I still had the keys, but admitted that it was really easy to break into with a coat hanger wire, as I had to resort to that many times in the past.
During the next six hours, I told everyone I saw that my car had been stolen. I told people in the theatre, in the cafeteria and anyone I knew that I ran into around campus. I was angry because I felt like I was being specifically targeted. (And this was before all the bad stuff happened with Dird.) Now, I really didn't need my car that much. I almost always walked where I needed to go around campus and the areas of town that were nearby, like the Pizza Mill and Sub Factory. But I had a job on the weekends and I absolutely needed to drive to get there.
Later that afternoon, I got a call at my dorm room. It was a police officer who told me they had found my car. It was outside a Mexican fast food restaurant across the street from De Baca Hall. I ran all the way down there. My car was there. It looked okay. I met the officer. I pulled out my car key to open the door. The officer asked me a question: "Did you eat here last night?" I realized I had. Because I was so used to walking everywhere around ENMU, I plain forgot that I had driven to the restaurant to get something to eat. I felt like a moron.
Of course, this got around college. I felt like it was high school all over again, in which one stupid mistake labeled me as a loser for the rest of my time there. I really couldn't live it down. I was glad to have my car back, but it actually would have been better if someone had taken it and completely trashed it. I had to realize that this was my mistake and I had to own it, but it was really hard to because of the big deal I had made about it earlier. If I hadn't told very many people, it wouldn't have affected me so much.
A few years later when I lived in Denver, I left work at the end of my shift. I went out to the parking lot and couldn't find my car. Remembering what happened in college, I had to think really hard to recall whether or not I had driven to work. I actually lived within walking distance, so I didn't always drive. I realized that I did drive and that someone had stolen my car. That freaked me out, but it was not embarrassing because it really happened that time. I'll be going into more details about those times my car was stolen much later on.
I will say that when your car gets stolen, all you can think about is how violated you feel. It's just not the same as when your car stops working. You know that someone did something to you, and maybe you weren't a specific target, but it takes awhile to feel any better.
No comments:
Post a Comment