Last week, I was the victim of a crime. While parked outside my workplace for ten minutes in the middle of the day, someone managed to shatter the window of my Geo Metro and snatch my life, I mean, my purse from inside.
For me, the incident was my first brush with this kind of crime – I’ve never had anything stolen from me in Eugene before. But, as many of my fellow college-aged friends and co-workers reminded me, I am not alone.
According to the Eugene police officer who helped me report the robbery, as well as other Eugeneans who have similarly had their most valuable belongings criminally yanked from their lives, property theft is a growing, terrible new trend in quiet little Eugene.
So, as I lamented the long list of lost items in my overfilled purse and searched the surrounding area for any discarded remnants of my bag, hoping to recover even a mere lip gloss from my losses, I couldn’t help but think of all the others out there who knew, from experience, how I felt.
After all, any college student who has had their bag or purse stolen probably lost exactly what I lost: an iPod, a camera, a cell-phone, a wallet, and possibly a laptop. These essentials come everywhere with us in this day and age. We travel across town, out to restaurants and into class laden with a sack full of hundreds of dollars of stuff.
Post the “I-was-just-robbed-of-everything-I-own” freak-out, I awoke the morning after the crime feeling strangely calm. I borrowed some money to fix my shattered window, stopped
by the DMV to get a new license, and went about my daily life with empty pockets. Without a book bag or purse tugging at my shoulder, begging like a child for constant, vigilant attention, I felt oddly free and with nothing to lose.
My grandfather likes to remind me that in his college days, students didn’t even lock their bikes when they went to class. Things were simpler and more honest then, possibly because people traveled around as I am now forced to do – with only
some change or a car key in their pocket. There wasn’t a whole lot to steal off of an individual then.
But in our era of expensive, portable technological devices, we walk through our lives vulnerable to immense material loss, with our most valuable items literally stuffed in our pockets. Perhaps we are just asking to be robbed.
Pontificating this, I began to rejoice in the freedoms of the more simple life my robbery had left me with.
Without a cell phone, beckoning me in one of those typical high-pitched rings, I felt oddly free of all the stress that comes with knowing someone can get a hold of you at any time and for any reason.
And, when I did need to make a call while out and about, I was forced to dig up some change and, to my delight, use an old-fashioned payphone. It had been years since I’d last listened to my quarters drop into that coin-slot or dialed seven digits on those big, silver, numbered buttons.
And then there were the consequences of losing my iPod. While at first devastated, I quickly remembered that my music is backed up on old-school CDs and moved on with life. In my car, without some 8,000 songs to plug into while driving around, I tuned in to some old-school local radio and discovered some great new music. My lost-iPod angst quickly dissipated.
In addition, without those sleek Apple headphones to stuff in my ears while trekking around town or through campus, I began silently enjoying the real sounds of daily life in a way I hadn’t for a long time. I felt suddenly connected to a real world that technology, no matter how high-tech, can never bring you closer to.
Call me a hippie, but without all of my devices, contraptions, and credit cards to get me through the day, I realized how many of us move through life burdened by our belongings and separated from the tangible, present world that lies all around us. Life may never be as simple as it was in our grandparents’ college days, where even bike-theft was a rarity, but we can try to revive the old-fashioned, simple, and often more stress-free way of living.
For me, it took losing hundreds of dollars of material and techy goods to realize that small truth.
Someday I’ll probably replace my cell-phone, and maybe I’ll get a new wallet to keep my driver’s license in, but gone are my days of purse-lugging, credit-card-swiping, technology-dependent isolation and vulnerability. Every incident holds the possibility of a lesson learned, and from my shattered car window, I think I learned mine.