Half Empty

Today, Katie and Anna Marie were visiting the station, and a bunch of us went out to lunch at Monk’s. We got there around 1:00PM, and the place was pretty packed, wall to wall. We stood around a while, and waited for a place to open up (around lunchtime, this place gets crazy busy).

Finally, we get a table. We settle in and look over our menus. I’m still a bit chilly at this point, so I keep my hoodie on (but I’ve taken off my camera bag, and it’s slung over the back of the chair). The waitress comes by, gets our drink orders, and we fall to talking a bit and getting caught up.

Maybe five minutes after the drinks arrive, I feel somebody bump into my chair. It was a pretty abrupt thing, but I didn’t think too much of it. Maybe thirty seconds later, I reach back to check for my bag… and it’s gone.

I get up and look around. I head to the door and walk outside. I scan up and down the street, trying to spot my bag slung on someone’s shoulder, but all I see are bodies. At this point, time is ticking so I pick a direction and go. I end up circling the block, and don’t see anyone at all. I decide on a whim to go down to the Blue Line stop, but that was pretty much a last-ditch effort. I walked up and down, and there were maybe 5 people total there, waiting around.

Back at the surface, I find Ben and the two of us check a few of the nearby trashcans – thinking that perhaps the thief threw the bag away (with my notebook in it). I circled the intersection like a baseball player, and found nothing.

Back inside Monk’s, I settled down for my burger. The nice thing about lunch was that the owner, after we told him what happened, put my meal on the house. He was very nice about it all.

So… no pictures today, as my camera got stolen during lunch. In the middle of a crowded restaurant. While it was hanging off my chair, where I was sitting.

I never did get around to buying renter’s insurance which, I found out, would have covered something like this. So even though my place got broken into last year, I neglected to take that extra precaution and plop down the $10 per month to make sure I was insured.

To be honest, this time around, I’m not nearly as angry. By the time I got back to the table, I was pretty giddy with adrenaline (I was really hoping I could have caught the guy and taken my camera back). But more valuable than the camera? I really wish I could have kept that notebook that was in the camera bag.

There wasn’t anything earth-shattering in that thing. Mostly notes. A few phone numbers maybe. But whenever I’d get a poem idea, I’d jot it down in there. Or if I met someone and asked if I could photograph them, I made sure to write down their names, the details of our meeting. I’d record notes on my day to day, and some of that even found its way here.

I only have a few old, notebooks that are actually full. Sifting through them, it’s a bit like a photo album. The notes and scrawls and doodles all represent specific moments in time. Leafing through a notebook is as powerful as a diary in many ways. It’s a record of things, and wasn’t all that valuable to anyone other than me.