The art of losing

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

—Elizabeth Bishop

Someone stole my laptop in New York a few weeks ago. It either happened as I navigated the crowds in Grand Central, or on the sidewalk as I lowered my head against a blustery and rainy day, or on the subway platform. I was headed to meet a friend for lunch, arrived early and got a coffee, stationing myself at the counter for a few minutes of work. But when I reached for my computer, I found that the side zipper of my backpack had been slid open, and the laptop was gone.

I ran outside to track it with my phone, but it had already been taken offline. The thieves knew what they were doing.

I returned to the cafe and sat stunned. There seemed to be no recourse. No sense in alerting the police, who had more pressing concerns. It wasn’t the machine I mourned—it’s painful to replace, but it’s replaceable. My real worry was the decades-worth of writing and photos and music and other documents that I hadn’t remembered backing up in the cloud. Was it up there? I looked skyward from a window. The rain whipping and swirling over Central Park suggested that even the cloud had broken. My work was likely lost out there, dissipated, sinking into the dirty grass, trickling down the street drains.

While I’m always trying to improve my reactions to minor daily frustrations, I’m quite good at facing bigger losses that are out of my control. I fairly quickly reached a zen state over the matter, knowing I would need to spend the afternoon buying a new computer and starting to hunt for years of work. That was that. I either had all those story drafts, and the novel-in-progress, and photos of my kids when they were babies, and the letters and poems, or I didn’t. But honestly, would I have ever really done anything with all that stuff? I hadn’t yet, so maybe losing it would be no great disaster. Perhaps it could feel freeing, a sort of artistic reincarnation, a chance to start fresh. I drained the last of my coffee and went about my day, trying to be at peace with the loss.

That wasn’t the first time I’d had something stolen. I used to drive a small maroon pick-up truck around Oakland—except when someone else was driving it, because it got stolen with alarming regularity. Sure, you didn’t need a key to get it started. But the truck also just may have been cursed.

Once it was gone for a month. I was a middle school teacher then, and my students would frequently report having seen my truck speeding along some interstate, like a ghostship cruising the freeways of the Bay Area. I walked a lot that month and memorized the bus schedules, and then the truck reappeared, recovered down in the warehouse district of East Oakland, not far from where the Warriors played before Oakland lost them to San Francisco, and where the Raiders played before Oakland lost them to Vegas, and where the A’s played before… when is it they’re leaving Oakland? The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

One morning my truck was stolen from in front of my house while I ate breakfast, and on that same day, just before sundown, I found it myself, abandoned a dozen blocks away. They’d taken the equipment for the middle school basketball team I coached, but otherwise everything was as I left it. I hopped in and drove it home.

It had somehow become the people’s truck, operating under its own set of rules, owned by Oakland. It seemed filled with the intent to be lost. I eventually accepted its unique situation in the world, and when I moved from California to DC a couple years later, I gave the truck to a friend as a gift. I didn’t feel like it was mine to sell.

The first time something was stolen from me, I was 19, traveling through Ecuador by bus. My friend and I had a backpack filled with our valuables—passports, cash, a camera, and a roll of toilet paper. (You don’t travel across Ecuador without carrying your own toilet paper.) The ride from Cuenca to Quito took ten hours, through the rainforest on a narrowing mountain road from which buses sometimes slipped off the side and vanished into the green abyss. We survived that jungle stretch and continued north through a series of villages, and in one of them, two men boarded and sat directly behind us. I registered their arrival but didn’t pay much attention to them.

Soon we hit a military checkpoint. A pair of uniformed teenage soldiers climbed onto the bus with their machine guns, making their way up the aisle to check each passenger’s documents. I lifted the backpack from between my feet to retrieve our passports, and even before I unzipped the main compartment, I could see that the toilet paper roll had been shredded. Little bits of white paper fell from the bag like confetti as I opened it. Someone had rifled through our things. I wanted to investigate, but one of the armed teenagers was waiting impatiently to see our papers, so I dug out the passports and handed them over. The soldiers left the bus, and we turned to our backpack. The camera was gone. It was a vintage Canon my dad had given me, and I was in Ecuador mostly to take photos, so this was not something I wanted to lose.

I stood up and turned to the two men behind us. They were speaking loudly and pointing out the window at nothing in particular, clearly trying to avoid my stare. One of them had a torn scrap of toilet paper sticking out of his shirt pocket like a handkerchief. He saw me notice it, and he tried to tuck it into the pocket nonchalantly. There were other bits of paper in their laps and on the floor at their feet.

We’d been in Ecuador for a couple months at this point, and my Spanish had become conversational but not fluent. “Where is my camera?” I asked them in Spanish.

They both started shouting at once, feigning outrage at the implied accusation. They spoke at roughly ten times the speed of mine, and at a much higher volume, and there were two of them, so it was difficult to get a word in. But I did my best to say that my camera had been taken from my bag, and the remnants of toilet paper served as proof that they were responsible.

With all the commotion, the driver stopped the bus and swiveled in his seat. Many of the passengers turned to see what was happening. One of the thieves pretended to be particularly insulted, ranting and raving up the aisle, decrying the injustice, and then he fled the bus, running across a plaza. I watched him disappear into the village, knowing he had the camera, while the other man dropped his tote bag onto the seat and raised his arms, offering to let me or anyone else look through his things.

An especially helpful passenger encouraged me to inspect the guy’s tote, but there was no point. We let him leave, and my friend and I sank back into our seats and began removing each thing from our backpack to take inventory. 

Our cash was gone too, a couple hundred dollars in Ecuadorian sucre. 

At age 19 I still harbored a naive worldview that people were generally good and kind and that luck protected me. Yes, I read and watched the news, but the transgressions and tragedies covered there felt distant from my own life. I guess that’s the definition of privilege. Yet my dismay wasn’t really over material possessions. I’d lost a camera and some money, but the violation felt much bigger at that moment. It felt like my perception of the world had crashed, that my unshaken trust in humankind had mudslided off into the jungle.

And then things unexpectedly shifted again. That passenger who’d been most helpful and sympathetic had been rooting around in the seats vacated by the thieves, brushing aside the shredded toilet paper. Stuck between the two seats, he came up with a wallet. “Is this yours?” he asked. It wasn’t. We looked through it with him and found that it was the wallet of the second thief, the one who had stayed behind to let his comrade dart off with the goods. The wallet had roughly the same amount of cash that we’d lost, along with a bunch of strange business cards, photos of his kids, and his identification papers. He was Colombian—here was his name and birthdate and home address—and he wouldn’t be able to cross another border or get through a checkpoint without these documents.

“Take this,” the nice man said. “Maybe it can help you.”

We arrived some hours later in Quito and went to the apartment of my friend’s dad, Patrick, who was Ecuadorian. After we told him our story, he carefully laid out the contents of the wallet on the table, thinking through each item as we stood by. The business cards didn’t make sense to me. They represented all sorts of small businesses with which no self-respecting thief would ever associate. Some of the businesses were Colombian, some were Ecuadorian, some were from other South American countries. Patrick put his finger on one and slid it to an empty space on the table. “This is the one we call,” he said. It was for a poodle-grooming establishment.

It had to be a front, Patrick explained. We stood by while he placed the call and asked for the thief by name. When the person on the other end claimed to have never heard of the guy, Patrick told him, “We have all his documents here. He has five minutes to call me back at this number before we contact the police.”

The phone rang two minutes later. It was the thief. Patrick instructed him to deliver the camera to the front desk of his apartment building by 7pm. Once it was delivered, the receptionist would call Patrick to inspect it, and if everything appeared in working order, the thief would be able to pick up his wallet by noon the next day. The thief asked if there was any money in his billfold. Patrick repeated the question for us, and we shook our heads. “No money,” he reported.

While we waited for the camera to be delivered, we sat down for a little art project, drawing fake currency on rectangles of paper with the Colombian’s caricature in the center, labeled with the Spanish words for thief and asshole in script below each portrait. We created currency for the exact amount of money he’d had and then stuffed these new bills into his wallet.

While we were decorating the money, the thief called again to ask the make and model of our camera. He had an entire bagful and so didn’t know which one was ours.

And so my camera was returned to us only a handful of hours after it had been stolen in a tiny village in the middle of Ecuador, our lost cash restored by what we found in his wallet, and a strange kind of justice seemed to have been meted out. I almost felt guilty, but I couldn’t get past the utter improbability of the whole thing. Karma, people would say with a smile when I told the tale at dinner parties.

It was much later, several years, that the story began to feel less fun. I kept thinking about the photos of the man’s kids tucked into his wallet. Here was someone acting in desperation, probably in order to support his family. I can’t imagine he expected he would spend his 40s away from home, in a foreign country, swiping cameras from young tourists. I’m not justifying his actions, but I do feel a pang of regret for having taken his money and replaced it with a small stack of fuck-yous. Perhaps I could have reacted in a way that might’ve helped both him and me grow from our encounter, rather than having gloated in victory. I was the 19-year-old American, traveling abroad with a vintage camera and riding a lifelong lucky streak. He was the father stealing things on buses. I could’ve handled the situation with compassion.

I felt particularly regretful when I told the story to my kids and they asked, Wait, you kept the guy’s money? Kids reveal you to yourself, through their purity and directness. I could see their calculations as they converted the story’s details into a rough guide for how they might approach similar circumstances in the future. All we can hope is that our children grow up to be better than we are.

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There’s always part of me that wants to be a Leonard Cohen-style ascetic, to vanish to a mountain retreat and divest myself of all possessions, living silently for stretches of time. But of course that’s impractical and impossible for my current station in life: a father of two, a husband, a person with a job and a mortgage, someone who desires love and friendship and who wants to go on dates with my wife, spend days with my kids, hunt for adventure and drink too much wine and have nice things.

And so maybe these items—my camera, my pickup truck—that disappeared and then unexpectedly boomeranged back, serve as reminders that possession itself is ephemeral, uncertain, and overvalued, that I should aim to keep myself balanced in the way that Cohen did as he aged. He was both a monk and a rock star. He could surrender to every worldly pleasure, yet he could set it all aside and devote himself for years to the quiet pursuit of deeper wisdom.

In a bizarre coda to the laptop incident, I just got a call from the security office at Grand Central Station. Three weeks after I lost it, they recovered my computer, undamaged. The officer didn’t know where it came from or when exactly it was found; apparently it just showed up on his desk. What to make of that?