Part 25: Life's an Adventure

I'm sure many parents do this, but my father calls me once a week for no other reason than to hear my voice, and the conversation is always the same;

"Hi! What's new?"

"Nothing."

"Oh? Nothing is new?"

"Nope. I woke up, went to work, where I sat in a cubicle all day clicking a mouse with my pointer finger, came home, watched a little tv, and now I'm talking to you."

"Well, there has to be something exciting going on; you are an exciting person, and life is an adventure."

Every week, the conversation happens in just this way, and every week he acts completely and totally surprised that I don't have some sort of action-packed story to fill him in on.

And the conversation was the same as we rode up the rickety old elevator to our hotel room in San Diego, as we visited my brother for his birthday.

When Adam and I finally arrived home that Sunday night, we noticed that the door to the apartment below ours was wide open, which wouldn't necessarily be odd, except that that apartment has been vacant for months. I parked our car and walked toward the open door, when I noticed that the wooden door frame was shattered in pieces on the floor. The lights were on, and I heard water running, so I started to walk in.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" I heard Adam yell at me from the car.

"I'm going in to check it out!" I said back, and without hesitating, continued in.

No furniture (obviously). A few silver nuts and bolts were laying on the floor, and the carpet still had impressions in it from the furniture of the last tenant. I walked over to the kitchen sink, which was running full blast, and turned it off. There was still the noise of water running, so I ventured through the house, turning off all the sinks and faucets that had been turned on. Nothing else was unusual at all.

Adam came running in, and out of breath, he said, "What were you thinking?! What if the people who broke in were still here? What would you have done? Are you crazy?"

I looked at him, bewildered. "No... they would have got a stiletto heel to the temple, that's what would have happened. No one is here, so don't freak out."

We left a message on our landlord's phone about the break-in and continued to bring our luggage up to our apartment.

...

The next few nights, I stayed in while Adam left for a business trip. I was tired in every sense of the word, and even called in sick to work one day, just because it felt good to be alone. Adam got home the next evening and wanted to get dinner. We climbed down the steps of our apartment, and as I looked across the parking lot, noticed that my car was missing.

"Uh... Where is my car?" I stopped, as I stared at my empty parking space.

"Huh?"

"My car. It's gone."

"Did you park it somewhere else?"

"Adam, I haven't left the apartment in 2 days. My car is gone."

There wasn't any broken glass on the ground, or anything else that would suggest my car had been stolen, so we assumed it had been towed. We called the night manager to ask, and he got uncomfortably nervous the more he talked to us.

Apparently, he had an older map of the parking lot assignments, and didn't realize that my car was allowed to be there. He met us in the lot and waited with us for the tow truck to bring back my vehicle.

Thirty minutes later, a tall, scraggly, unshaven man wearing tight jeans and a baggy t-shirt came rolling up in his tow truck, with my car trailing behind. He got out of his truck and laughed, "This is your car, I would guess?! Yeah, I got a call over my radio sayin' uh, Dave, we're gonna need you to bring that car back, and I was like, oh shit! I stole somebody's car!" He had a big gap between his crooked teeth that blared as he talked and laughed. I liked him.

And as I watched him unhitch my car, I thought about it, and my dad might be right. There are exciting things happening all the time, I just have to open my eyes to them. I mean, these little things might not ever be a hit screenplay or a published book, but they're still definitely a jog from the mundane.

Needless to say, I had plenty to talk about when my dad called me that week.