Years ago, my wife hosted a Pampered Chef party at our house. When everyone had gone home, I couldn’t find my glasses anywhere. “Somebody stole my glasses,” I said. “No,” my wife said, “you left them somewhere.”
I searched the house top to bottom, then the garage, then every place I could think of. No glasses. I was sure someone had walked off with them. I told a buddy the whole story, and his advice was simple: “The best way to find them is to buy another pair.” So I did.
A few weeks later the Pampered Chef order arrived, and we took my sister’s share over to her place. Over coffee, she told us about something strange that had happened while they were moving her son. They’d rented a truck, driven from Lethbridge to his place, loaded everything up, gone on to Leduc and then into Edmonton. As they were heading back out of Edmonton, another driver pulled up beside them, honking and waving: “There’s a pair of glasses on your bumper!”
They weren’t hers, and they weren’t her husband’s. Everyone in the truck was wearing their own. “What are the odds of that?” she said.
“Well,” I said, “what are the odds they’re mine?”
They were. She’d brought them home with her, and she handed them back to me right there over coffee, the day we dropped off her Pampered Chef order.
I’d helped load the fridge cart into the back of the rental truck before they left, with my glasses clipped to my shirt collar. When I lifted the cart, they must have dropped into the gap between the bumper and the tailgate. And there they stayed, for hundreds and hundreds of kilometres: Lethbridge to Leduc, Leduc to Edmonton, and partway back again before anyone noticed.
So I phoned my buddy Don, the optometrist who’d made those glasses. “Don,” I said, “you make the strongest glasses of anybody I’ve ever known.”
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“Because they hung on for 400 miles and never fell off.”
So in the end I had two pairs of glasses: the new ones, and the old ones that had been to Edmonton and back.
Gary Wheeler, VE6CV