It brings about a curious kind of vertigo, opening a car that you assume contains your things, only to find the space empty. Some part of my brain still assumes that it's all a trick -- after all, *I* certainly didn't move the things, so they must still be *somewhere*, right? -- but I've been growing progressively more and more angry as the day goes on. Suddenly remembering that I had not one, but *three* sets of rechargeable batteries with my camera, or that I had very deliberately clipped my house and car keys into my duffel bag before leaving Boston, quickens my pulse and lends credence to the clamor in my hindbrain that says that it must have been a trick, that my socks (which I can vividly picture in my mind) must be sitting just around the next corner, waiting for me to find them.

Having discovered the things gone at midnight, I drove around the next morning looking at public dumpsters nearby, TV-taught that people interested in things like laptops and cameras would surely discard my Toms of Maine products and pajama tops as early as possible, if only as a courtesy. (By the same logic, I suppose, since they've now got a cache of my business cards, I should expect an anonymous thank you call to my work number sometime this week; Ms. Manners, I'm sure, would encourage any polite thief to send a thank you note, but I can't hope for too much.)

The very nice police officer who took my report told me about another call she'd taken this morning: a woman called to report that her car, sitting quietly in her parking lot, was up on blocks with all four wheels and tires missing. It seemed to me unlikely that the two thefts were related -- after all, it must have taken a lot more time and effort to block up a car than simply to open a trunk and grab the grey nylon bags within -- but while out looking around, I kept an eye out for tires, too. No dice.

The pub we were laughing in last night sits in a mixed residential area on the fuzzy boundaries of the university campus. Student houses with soggy (now frozen) couches on the porch intermix with research buildings, and as I drove around looking for dumpsters, I found a wide variety of residential, business, and university trash. Pound for pound, I likely could have replaced the mass of the things I'd lost at the first dumpster I tried, but my mother has raised me to be slightly more selective than that, so I left the broken up pallets and bags of sodden napkins and moved on. Lumber, old shoes, and several broken lamps later, I was coming down to the end of the easily visible dumpsters and starting to pan about for the next tier when I came to the end of my searching: a dumpster as tall as me, filled to the top with large, empty bags which had previously held HIGH PROTEIN MONKEY DIET. White and grey and looking like nothing so much as a simian version of the bagged food I feed my cats, the sacks had an abstract monkey graphic printed on them, along with a list of ingredients I didn't read. I was already halfway back to the car, laughing out loud into the snowy air. There could be no clearer sign that I was not to find my things than a dumpster full of MONKEY DIET, and with that I gave up looking.

Several hours later, I can't pretend that the forced, gritted-teeth-calm that I held myself to last night was real. The writings I was working on in my computer have become in my mind the foundations of The Great American Epic, now lost to me forever; the pictures I'd spent blood and two days tramping around the woods to take have become The Best Pictures I Will Ever Shoot, and the pain of losing both still leaves me occasionally wincing, no matter what my insurance company may or may not come up with for me. I am accepting only slowly the thought that someone else, someone unknown, has permanently taken things precious to me. There will be no grand punchline, no cameras, no moral -- only stranger's fingers on a blustery night, grasping and unwanted.

And yet.

I've still got the presents I brought for my very extended family, wrapped and stashed under two houses' trees the day before. I have a roaring fire inside and snowy prairie hills without. My mother's pesto has lost none of its potency since last year, and my raver younger brother is gleefully setting up his turntables in the living room next to the christmas tree, despite my mother's indignation. The moon is shining over rolling hills, I've acquired enough underwear and socks to get me back to Boston, and between toasted chestnuts and mulled wine, I can feel some clenched part of me opening up again.

It's been a year of aching loss and hardship all around, and as much as the romantic in me would love to find some grand design in it all, sometimes the most I can do is breathe in and out, drink my wine, and look at the moon. We are a fragile bunch, all of us, vulnerable to tragedies large and small, planes and thefts, absences and terror, and on this cold night in a cold season there seems little else left to us to do but relish the fires and loves around us, the luxury of having the money to buy new boxer shorts, and the coming christmas stew.

Even without my socks, I think that it's enough.

Christmas Eve 2001