Saturday I went to the gym, then I went to the department to charge my phone and read the paper. Between the gym and the department, I stopped at the bus stop to pick up the paper. There I found, sitting on the bus stop bench, my travel coffee mug. I know it’s mine because it looks like mine and it has the same wear marks from the bottle basket I have on my bike. So I think how lucky I am that I wanted the paper and that I went to the bus stop to get it, where I must have accidentally left my coffee mug while waiting for the bus the day before. I didn’t even realize I was missing it!

Then it occurs to me that this bottle is, in fact, not mine! The day before, I got off the bus early to pick up bagels, and when I went home, I got on the bus at a different stop than the one where I found my mug. Never on Friday was I at that bus stop, though I positively had my coffee mug with me. So then it occurs to me that I found an identical and identically scuffed coffee mug, but when I get home, my old mug is not in my bag, leading me to, again, believe that the new mug is in fact the old mug.  But then I take a closer look at the mug I’ve now brought home, and some of the scuff marks don’t quite look right, and I think my mug is cracked in a place where this one isn’t but I’m not sure.

So now the questions.  Is this even my mug?  If not, where is it and whose is this one?  If it is,  how did it get to the bus stop? A couple possibilities present themselves. One of my friends noticed that I left my mug in the department and took it home, meaning to give it back to me at some point in the future. Unfortunately, that person then forgot it at the bus stop, leaving it to be found by me the next morning. That doesn’t make much sense though, as I’ve got a mailbox someone could easily have put my mug in.

The other possibility is that I myself left the mug on the bus and, somehow or another, the mug managed to leave the bus and get deposited on the bus stop bench later in the day when the bus cycled back to campus. The problem with this theory is that I finished my coffee while in the department, which means I would have put it in my bag when I returned home instead of carrying it around. Why carry an empty coffee container and a backpack? Why would my mug have escaped me on the bus and end up at my very stop? Is there a third option? Possibly, probably, but I don’t know what it is. I am sure that whatever explanation is the right one, it depends on my misremembering something about the morning though right now I’m positive I haven’t.

This morning I found a toddler lying in a hedge, crying loudly for his mother.  No likely candidates for mother were close by, so I went over to the toddler and asked him if he needed help. (I couldn’t tell if he was stuck in the hedge or not.)  Other people were walking by and ignoring him, so I thought maybe it wasn’t a big deal and the toddler could remain screaming in the bush. I asked him twice, but he just kept screaming. I figured better to help someone who doesn’t need it than not help someone who does, so I reached into the bush and pulled him out. I set him down in the grass next to the bush, and he ran off and disappeared, and now I’m not sure that really happened.

Tonight, I was standing in my front window putting a record on. Someone knocked on the window. Since it’s night time, I can’t see out very well, I just see a masked figure staring at me, tapping on the window. My heart raced. It was the mailman, delivering a package a week earlier than I expected it.  My heart is still racing.