Berck has bungee-corded me to the lawn chair that serves as my desk chair and is forcing me to write about the events last weekend that almost kept us in Chicago much longer than we intended. So, here goes.

I consider myself a lucky person. I am even lucky in my misfortune. When something unlucky happens to me, it usually happens in the most fortuitous circumstances…or even prevents a far greater misfortune. (Like that time Berck and I got locked out of the laundromat; the delay gave our bowels just long enough to realize the bad Mexican food we’d eaten needed to be expelled as quickly as possible…near nice, clean bathrooms instead of along the desolate stretch of highway on which we were about to embark.) I tell people I’m lucky, but really, I think someone is watching out for me. If you think about it, this requires about as much faith as believing that the principles of statistics are somehow cosmically altered for you personally.

The drive to Chicago was great. An overcast sky paced us all the way there, keeping the sun off our skin and the temperature perfect for top-down driving. Still, we were pretty tired when we arrived, having driven for most of13 hours.

Sydney gave us directions on the phone of exactly which side of which street on which to park. We found a Miata-sized space that Berck maneuvered into after several tries. We called Syd back to tell her we had arrived and began exhuming the contents of the trunk onto the sidewalk. I put up the car’s top and stuck my keys in the ignition to put up the windows. Then Syd arrived, and Berck wanted to sanitize the car’s interior, removing not only the attractively stealable items, like the radar detector and stereo faceplate, but every other worthless item not bolted down in the interior. “It can’t look cluttered,” he said. “That’s just asking for someone to break in.” Of course, since we never lock the car (that’s just asking for a thief to slice through the vinyl top), breaking in would actually mean simply pulling on the door handle.

We walked or took the L everywhere while in Chicago, as it’s a lot easier than braving city traffic or over-extending parking karma. When it was time to leave on Sunday morning (or noon by then), we made sure we had collected everything we’d brought and said goodbye to Sydney. I was a little irritated because I couldn’t find my keys in the spot where I’d emptied my pockets, but Berck had his keys, and I figured I must have forgotten stashing my set into one of my bags, or Berck had picked mine up by mistake. I asked Berck if he’d done something with my keys, and he got ticked off that I thought he might have. In any case, I figured they’d turn up later.

Down on the street, the Miata was still there, though the parking space around it had widened a bit over the weekend. I glanced in the passenger window and noticed that most of the contents of the glove box were strewn over the car seat. Someone had broken into the car! There was nothing in the glovebox worth anything to anyone else, so nothing was missing. Nothing except an old credit card of mine that I had presumed lost and canceled; Berck had held onto it, partly as memento and partly ice scraper, I think. The thief, probably not stopping to examine the expiration date too closely, maybed dashed off with his prize as soon as he found it, since nothing else was gone; even the change in the cupholder was undisturbed.

I got into Sydney’s car and waited for Berck to finish reassembling the Miata. A couple of minutes later, Berck came storming toward the Solara. “I found your keys,” he said, disgusted.

“Where were they?”

“IN THE IGNITION!”

“Oops.”

He stormed back to the Miata. Then he stormed right back.

“And you left them ON! The battery is dead!”

I guess no one could steal the car with the battery dead. Even with the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked.

We couldn’t find any jumper cables in the Solara, and Berck wasn’t crazy about charging the Miata’s special battery that way anyway. So he took the live battery out of the Solara and replaced the dead battery in the Miata. The Miata started right up.

Then Berck unhooked the battery and took it back to the Solara. He was getting grease all over his hands and t-shirt and new shorts. The only thing I could do was sit on the sidewalk and feel useless and stupid. I thought about offering to hook the Solara back up, since I’d watched it being taken apart, but that was probably a bad idea. Instead, I decided to put the Miata’s spare tire back in its trunk, which had to be moved out of the way for the larger Toyota battery. Unfortunately, in the process I knocked the Miata’s positive cable against its body. The Miata’s engine immediately shuttered to a stop.

“Oh, no.”

“WHAT DID YOU DO?” Berck was furious. “You probably mucked the alternator all up! If you’re lucky, all you did was blow the main fuse!”

“We’ll go get another one,” I suggested.

“ON THE FOURTH OF JULY? What auto parts store is going to be open?!”

Berck yanked the main fuse out from under the hood. It looked okay, so he carried the Solara battery back to the Miata and hooked it all up again. The Miata started right up.

This time I let Berck put the Miata battery in first. “Now you can put the spare back in.”

We drove back to Norman without further incident, getting in around 2:30 a.m.