I've written in the past about the various acts of violence and crime that people we're close to have experienced here in Spokane. This time it was our turn. My mom was here this week visiting from Utah. She had helped us move here last year (CJ was only three weeks old) but spent most of that week helping us unpack. So we wanted her here for CJ's first birthday, and to spend some time relaxing with us as we actually showed her around Spokane this time.
You can't come to Spokane and not go see the beautiful Manito Park. In fact, when she was here last August, we took her there, but only for a drive through. So on Wednesday we decided that this time we wanted to get out, enjoy the absolutely beautiful day, and walk around and enjoy the various gardens Manito has to offer. It was a busy day at the park - we found the only available parking spot by the rose gardens - with people walking everywhere, kids playing, dogs running, and even photographers doing photo shoots. Everyone knows what a wonderful setting Manito has to offer. Anyway, after visiting the rose gardens, the Japanese garden, and the Duncan gardens, we decided to head back home for some dinner. As we approached our car, suddenly the peaceful feeling we had felt disappeared as we saw that someone had smashed in the back passenger side window. At first I had to take a double-take to make sure it was really our car. Once I realized it was, my heart sank and I realized we probably no longer had any CDs or a CD player. But as we got closer, I saw everything still there, including CJ's new, and expensive car seat, the adaptor for our iPod (thank goodness our iPod wasn't in there) and our CD player. I kind of chuckled and thought, "I guess they didn't like our CDs." I seriously thought that we'd gotten away with just a broken window and nothing stolen (how naive of me)...until my mom slowly walked up behind me, looked in the car, and calmly said that her purse had been on the floor.
What?! I hadn't realized that my mom had actually left her purse in the car! I don't think I had even noticed that she brought it. We had locked our car when we got to the park, more out of habit than anything, and the fact that we were just talking about our friends, the Lemon's, who had stuff stolen from their car at Manito park last fall. I like to think that if I had noticed my mom's purse I would have said something, but probably not. It was the middle of the day, it was busy with people everywhere, and our car was locked. I probably wouldn't have thought twice about it. What a hard lesson to learn!
Our window was shattered - yea, that stunk - but I felt absolutely horrible that my 69 year old mother, who had come to visit her daughter and have a vacation, had everything stolen. She now has no driver's license, social security card, insurance cards, credit cards, checks, or cash. And more upsetting to her was the loss of the more personal things: her purse was brand new, her glasses were in there, and even more importantly, she had old pictures in her wallet that she really cherished (she had just shown them to me that morning); a picture of me in the 7th grade, a picture of my brother dressed up in a tux from 1993, a family picture from 13 years ago. Though she was calm and relaxed at first, as time went on, she just got sad about the whole situation. We did our best to help her get things settled - calling the police, the bank, the credit card companies, the insurance companies - and even drove around to several Shell stations trying to see if the thieves had chucked her purse after getting a tank of gas (the bank told us that was the first, and only place, they went).
We're grateful that we were able to put a stop on all of my parents checks and credit cards, so they weren't damaged financially, and that the only damage to our car was the window. We're also grateful that none of us were physically harmed by any of this. There are lots of scenarios that could have been much worse...some of our friends here have actually experienced those (car stolen, caught in middle of drive-by shooting), so we're grateful that we were involved in something pretty minor.
Bryce and I have had some experiences here in Spokane that have really shown the honesty and good nature of people, so at this point, we're praying that someone will find my mom's purse and turn it in, so that we can all have our faith in people restored.
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