To Catch a Thief

On Saturday Murray and I headed to Park City to see if we could see any celebrities. Well, also to go through the different galleries. Anyway, we saw Nicki Hilton, which I could really care less about. Two years ago, Murray met Steven Colbert. That's more of what I'd be interested in.

Parking was impossible. It took us about two hours to finally find a spot. Then we had to wait for a shuttle to take us to Main Street. Getting onto the crowded shuttle bus reminded me a lot of Italy, so I instinctively zipped my purse shut and explained to Murray that Italy forced me to develop some pretty good anti-theft skills. He asked if someone would grab your purse/wallet/belonging and then go into a crowd of people. I said no, that generally it happens while you're already in a crowd of people. And the thief doesn't go anywhere---s/he just stays right there. And then when you realize something's happened, and you say something, then everyone in the crowd, including the thief, just stares at you.

At this point, Murray said that he believes that because of human nature, someone in the crowd would say, "The thief must be among us! Let's work together to figure it out!" And then I laughed in his face. I really hope to live to see the day when Murray pipes up in a crowd of people, "The thief must be among us! Let's work together to figure it out!!"

Speaking of thieves. And ghosts. I'm afraid of thieves. Murray's afraid of ghosts. And when we got back from Park City, we saw a pound of bacon sitting on our kitchen counter. This was the good stuff, too. I'd had it in the freezer. Yet there it sat on the kitchen counter. Thawed. I asked Murray about it. He said that he'd found it there that morning and it was frozen solid. He wondered why I'd taken it out of the freezer, but just left it there because I must have had something in mind.

The thing is, I never went into the kitchen that morning. The night before, Murray's brother Steve and his fiancée Moleste were over. I thought maybe one of them had pulled it out when they were looking for ice cubes, but Murray and I talked it through and remembered that we all drank bottled water straight from the bottles. Besides, if it was frozen solid in the morning, it couldn't have been taken out the night before.

It really was awful trying to figure it out. In fact, it had been a long day, and so I finally said to Murray that I didn't want to talk about it anymore. And yet, I couldn't let it go. So I opened the freezer, hoping that something inside would trigger our memory of what had happened, and so we didn't have to concede that it was either thieves or ghosts. (The thieves didn't take anything valuable and the house is too new to be haunted, so both were unlikely options.)

Then Murray spotted the medium format film in the freezer and suddenly the memory started coming back to him. He was checking out our stock of film in the morning, and had to remove the bacon to see it better. Then he shut the freezer door, saw the bacon on the counter, poked it to find it frozen solid, and wondered why I had taken the bacon out of the freezer.

Who needs ghosts or thieves when you can rob and haunt yourself?