You’re not going to believe this

I don’t really like running with music. I have this weird adorable little compulsion to run on the beat if I have a song blaring in my ears. Which is great when my iPod plays Hooked on Classics or the One Tin Soldier club mix. But when it cycles to a tender love ballad or anything from A Little Night Music, I mess up my groove and trip all over myself. So I usually run with nothing but my wandering imagination to keep myself occupied.

And while my wandering imagination takes me to some weird places—I recently found myself explaining direct-mail basics to a federal grand jury—it works for me. And nobody gets hurt. So I stick with it. But that’s not the part you’re not going to believe.

You see, on this morning’s run as I fought to ignore the foreboding tightness in my left hamstring, my mind wandered to the bus I would be catching to go to work in an hour. In the little story playing out in my head, the bus driver recognizes me when I get on, asks me if I’d lost something the day before, and hands me my poor little homesick phone. And everybody likes a happy ending, so I kept replaying the story over and over in my head for five hamstringy miles. But still, that’s not the part you’re not going to believe.

My bus route starts a block north of our condo, so I’m usually the first person on my bus in the morning. I have to get off downtown when the bus is its most crowded, so I always sit in the same seat right across from the back door so I can beat a hasty exit through the morning throngs. When I got on the bus this morning, the bus driver wasn’t the driver I’d had yesterday. In fact, she wasn’t even one of the three or four drivers I’ve come to recognize on my route. She was pleasant and smiley, but she didn’t hand me my damn phone. No biggie, I thought. There’s still a minuscule chance the phone will be sitting in my seat when I get back there.

Armed with this delusion, I lurched my way to the back of the bus as it rumbled down the street. And when I got to my seat—and here finally is the part you’re not going to believe—there was a goddamned cell phone sitting right where I usually plop my butt. True story!

Unfortunately, the damn thing wasn’t mine.

But, flush with the idea that karma is a benevolent mistress, I rushed the phone up to the bus driver so she could turn it into the CTA’s lost and found. And when I got to work this morning I called the CTA’s lost and found myself to reap my sweet reward.

But my reward wasn’t a triumphant reunion with my poor little phone. No! It was the smack-in-the-face reality that my phone had never been turned in. Karma, it turns out, is a fickle little bitch.

And she’s totally gonna suffer the consequences when I rat her out to the federal grand jury.