So the protagonist of this story was on her way to the Working Families Party Mayoral Forum, where she was supposed to "live blog" the debate between Mayor Bloomberg and Democratic candidates for mayor, City Council Member Tony Avella and Comptroller William Thompson.
This obviously distracted woman entered the Q train station at Seventh Avenue and sat down on the subway bench. Waiting for the Q, she started to read page 600 of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, a book she's been trying to finish for days and then got on the train. When the train got to Atlantic Avenue she realized she didn't have her computer.
"Where is my computer?" she thought nervously. "Where is my computer?" she thought again rapidly reviewing everything that lives on her computer.
So she backtracked; got on the Q back to Seventh Avenue; she checked where she'd been sitting on the train platform. No computer.
As she came out of the subway, the rain was starting and she walked quickly to Chase Bank, where she'd been prior to getting on the train. She was with her son Henry, who was trying to set up a checking account. She called her son's cell phone.
"Do you have my computer," she asked him.
"No, I do not have your computer," he told her.
On the way to Chase she called the personal banker to see if she'd left her computer in his cubicle.
"Nope, it's not here," he said.
Still, she raced to the bank half expecting to find it leaning against an ATM wall but no, no computer. No computer in the personal banker's office. No, no, no.
Her jacket and pants were drenched as was her hair and she turned onto Third Street.
"Come downstairs," she told her husband. "And bring a towel," she told him after telling him about the lost computer.
When he met her downstairs he told her that he was already starting to change all her computer passwords.
"You never know. Someone could break into all your accounts," he said sounding a note of panic.
Once most of the passwords were changed, she lay on the green leather couch in a bathrobe and wondered how it was possible to lose one of the most important tool/objects in her life. The phone rang.
"It's for you," her husband said.
"I have your computer," a woman's voice sang into the phone. It was music to the protagonist's ears.
"I was hoping a wonderful, honest person would find it and call," she said.
"I'll call you when I get back to the Slope," the opera singer/realtor said.
(Meanwhile a MacBook computer in a sleek black Timbuk2 case was being carried by a lovely young woman, who happens to be an opera singer and real estate agent, through the streets of Chelsea and Union Square in Manhattan. This MacBook computer had been through a lot lately. When her hard drive died two months ago, the drive was sent to Dallas, Texas to attempt retrieval. That was like being without her brain for two weeks. When retrieval failed, she went to the Mac store on West 14th Street, where she lived for many days in a room behind the Genuis Bar and was retrofitted with a new Hard Drive. Later she returned to the Mac store to have her disk drive replaced. Swinging from the shoulder of this friendly opera singer/realtor, this MacBook was wondering why she was having such a hard time lately.)
"We should still continue to change your passwords," her husband said after the phone call. . "She sounds pretty smart."
"She'd not going to do anything," our protagonist said already smitten with this person who was kind enough to have found her computer and called.
"You never know…"
That night the protagonist of our story met the opera singer/realtor. She greeted her with an enormous bouquet of roses, sunflowers and lily's. The opera singer/realtor was thrilled.
"Thank you. This is so over the top."
Effervescent describes the opera singer/realtor's personality as she told the protagonist how she found her phone number:
"I opened your resume on your desktop. I wasn't being nosy," she said. "I was just looking for a way to contact you."
They had a lovely encounter in the lobby of the opera singer/realtor's building as the protagonist's faith was restored, once again, in the kindness of strangers.
