This is why I can't have nice things

No, this post is not about how I cut back on showering after I got my bathtub refinished. It's about my headphones. Now, since that post, the Panasonics quit working entirely and I did take to taking my Bose on the Metro. I'd gotten so accustomed to the noise reduction that the full noise was jarring, and I thought, what's the point of having these things if I rarely use them (i.e., for flying). And I did use them for my Indochina trip, which entailed nearly 50 hours of flying, as well as an overnight train. Point being, I decided it would be better to use this expensive device regularly at the relatively low risk of losing or damaging it, than to have it sit rarely used in a drawer.


When I first started taking the Bose on the Metro, I kept them in their case when I wasn't using them, but then the case fell out of my handbag at some point (I was wearing the headphones at the time, and the cables were safe in the drawer) so now I just leave them loose in my bag when I'm not wearing them. They double quite well as earmuffs.

The other day, I took my friend's toddler to dinner a few blocks from our building, and met her back close to the building after our respective dinners. I gave her, from my handbag, the food that the little one hadn't finished, and in the process, hung the headphones on the stroller so I could get to it. I promptly forgot about them and set out for the metro. As I approached the metro, I reached into the handbag for my headphones and came up empty.

I called my friend, who was already on her way (and had already packed the stroller into her car). She asked me if I wanted her to pull over, but I said no (we agreed she'd text me when she got home). I figured she would have seen the headphones as she packed up the stroller. I headed back to the park area where met up to check for them. Alas, they were not there.

On my way back to the metro, I heard screaming, and a split second later found myself caught in a sudden, torrential downpour. There hadn't been a cloud in the sky. I covered up with my rainjacket and hit under an awning until it let up a bit, and thought about how I'd be underground by now if I hadn't gone to check for the headphones. But it was fine; the rain let up somewhat within minutes, and I caught a train just in time.

I tried to be zen (yes, I know I'm misusing the word, but I don't have a better one and you know what I mean) about the headphones. "It's just money." But it's a lot of money. It was a lot of money the first time around but I determined it to be a worthwhile investment. Luckily, I had another amusing tragicomic issue from the evening to distract me. My friend didn't text, so I texted off a friendly reminder. I went to bed.

And woke up at 4am mentally screaming "HEADPHONES!" until I remembered that I'd chosen to be zen. I fell back asleep. By the time I woke up again at a more reasonable hour, my friend had texted to say that she'd found the headphones (and that, had she known they were so high-end--she thought they were earbuds and didn't understand why I was bothered--she'd have looked right away, in the car). She added, "$300 headphones hanging from a stroller may be a first for humanity." Later, when I went to retrieve them, she said she couldn't find them when she first checked--she unpacked the whole stroller and looked in every nook and cranny--and only when she went to fold it back up, she saw them hanging there. They were the same color as the stroller and camouflaged well.

So the day was saved. This story has a happy ending. I have my headphones. Maybe I can have nice things.