Watch My Bag

Who is the thief in this coffeeshop?

It's not your fault. It might be mine.

In a café some months ago a friend asked me to watch her bag while she went to the restroom. What was to watch? Especially in the years since that corner of our neighborhood got gentrified, right? No one goes into other people's purses anymore, especially in a bustling, brightly lit café. So I may have gone up to the counter to refill my tea, but only for a moment.

And then, a year later, came CONES, the show I made about my vision loss. And my friend saw it and said, "Now I know how that happened—How I asked you to watch my bag and all my credit cards got stolen out of it."

Huh?

"Yeah, I guess I shouldn't asked you to do that."

Hmm...

Let's return to the scene of the crime: A table at a coffee shop (that's what we used to call them before gentrification) with two chairs facing each other just three feet apart. My friend asks me to watch her bag, which is just three feet from my face, and I have no trace of being visually impaired—I am passing for able-bodied and, in all honesty, would clearly see if anyone were to start rifling through that bag for anything. Still, 30 minutes later, sometime after we'd had coffee and tea, my friend went to use her credit card at the grocery store, and it was gone.

Conclusions: People still steal stuff in gentrified neighborhoods. No one stole that card out from under my nose, they stole it from behind my back. And this did not happen because of my dis/ability, it happened because I got careless for a moment, and it only takes a moment for someone to steal something out of someone's bag.

Sorry about that.

So, who wants to go get coffee with me?
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Photo of "Awaken the Mud" by Beth Nixon. See her work at www.ramshackleenterprises.net.