strollers and alternate universes

I am giving up caffeine to try to make myself stop grinding my teeth, so if this post doesn't make much sense, remember that I am in a haze of fog with a dull headache in the background.

A strange thing happened on Sunday. When I woke up and went into my upstairs front room, that overlooks the field and train tracks across the street. There, in between the sidewalk and the tracks, sat a pile of baby accessories. A couple of strollers, a play pen, a bouncy chair, a big bag of stuffed animals... For those of you who don't know, I am sure that I was a cat in a past life and curiosity has often led me astray.

I found Sam, asleep on my bed with the boy of complex description. I wrestled with him to go for a walk. Sam is the only dog that I've ever met who doesn't like mornings. He also loves this particular human so much that he is reluctant, nay cantankerous, about being made to leave him. But I needed him as an excuse to check out the pile of treasures across the road, so I insisted and he eventually complied. We set out across the street.

The stuff was in excellent condition. It was brand name. It was expensive. It was too far from the road to have been dumped from a truck by accident and it was too far from the tracks to have come hurtling off a train car. It was a mystery. We walked and found another stroller in some bushes nearby. It was a full out mystery. Sam doesn't always make the correct distinction about what is acceptable to urinate on and what isn't when we are out for a walk. I took him home so that I could come back and inspect the loot, maybe find a name or an address or some clue. Nancy Drew on the case.

By the time I got Sam back and explained the situation to the boy of complex description, awake now after Sam jumped back on the bed and mauled him with love, there was someone else at the pile of stuff. Not just a someone. A me. A me from an alternate universe. Same haircut, same build, same colouring, same bloody black and white dog. It was creepy, there were definitely goosebumps on my arms. We watched her pick through the things from the front window and made speculations about what she would do. Was she looking for an address like I was going to? That was my theory. The boy had a different one. "She's taking what's good," he told me. "People aren't like you." She did load up a stroller with a pile of stuff and head presumably to wherever she lived. Maybe that was all she could take at one time. Maybe she was putting it somewhere to keep it safe.

And in the end, the day took on a hurried tone and we had things to do and places to be and a family emergency and the stroller mystery got pushed to the back burner. When I got home later that evening, I remembered. Everything was gone. Right down to the cardboard boxes and the little dresses wrapped in cellophane. I took Sam for his walk that way. The stroller in the bushes was gone too. Like it had never happened.

On Monday, one of my coworkers told me about a woman who had been caught stealing strollers from porches and selling them online. Maybe this was her loot. Maybe she ditched it.

Or maybe the alternate universe me found an address. Called someone. Maybe there are some people like me.

This world is so strange sometimes.