imagine that...

I lost my camera today.

Finally sitting down to breathe after being flustered for blocks and blocks
(having a dog will do that to you)
(especially an un-trained one)
It was once I sat down to relax that I realized that the camera, hanging snuggly by the thick woven string on my wrist, was no longer where it had been before.

Bells rang out. Sirens screamed. "What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?" barrelled through my brain.
Nearly no one takes more pictures than me.

I was at the Tomkins Square Dog Run when it hit me.
"Where have I just been? Where have I just gone?" shot through my head as I frantically searched the mud and wood chips beneath my bench.
Suddenly everyone was a suspect.
How long would I even have had to leave it for before some mangy, grungy, scroungy East Villager snatched it away in glee, giddy with the knowledge that they could secure a good price at the local pawn shop.

My dog was immediately snatched up, though she'd had no longer than five minutes to play and we, together, began to backtrack.
First the "oh-so-clean" Tomkins Square public Men's Restroom, where I'd taken the community dog bowls to fill some water for all the 35 lb. and under pups in the small dog section.
nothing
Not that I could have expected to find it there, if in fact I'd been stupid enough to take it off my wrist and then leave it.
Backtracking further in my mind I realized it could be anywhere.
I'd stopped to take a picture outside the gardens and rec space near Bowery and Chrystie Streets but after that it was anyone's guess. I had been to the bank, to stop and gaze at the collection of a street side bookseller. I had been all up and down the East Side and with a sprinting, panting dog barrelling ahead of me who knows where I could have been too distracted to notice the camera's departure?

But I had to take this terrifying process step by step, and the first place to look after the toilets was the small pizza place right on the edge of the park where I'd stopped for a slice.
The one man running the joint had told me I could keep my dog inside and as a result I decided to eat in the surprisingly spacious back area. It was due to the fact that the pizza was neither particularly warm nor tasty and also due to the company of a rambunctious young girl bouncing around my dog while her father continued to loudly scold her actions, getting nowhere in actually controlling her, that soon pushed me out of the joint before I'd more than half-way finished.

Upon my return to the pizza place I was met with even more grief and dread when I frantically half gasped, "HAVE YOU SEEN MY CAMERA? WAS A LITTLE BLACK CAMERA LEFT HERE?" and was told only "Uh, No. Check the back." When I'd gotten back there, at least a full ten minutes after having first left, I found that with no camera of any kind in sight I was more or less doomed.

And then a voice came softly from behind me.
The source figure not even noticed before.
"um, hi, you left your camera here I think."
I spun.
The awful dad and the loud girl were still there (amazing that pizza-eating could even take that long) and they had not only found but were now returning my camera to me!

"OH MY GOD!" I shouted, "WHERE DID YOU FIND IT?"
"oh, you just left it there on the counter. we were going to go to the dog park to look for you 'cause we figured that's where you were headed."
"OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!" I shouted, unable to get out of this Cameraland Bermuda's Triangle fast enough.
I wanted to and considered offering to give this gentleman a bit of money, 20 bucks or something for his kindness and his honesty, but he was with his daughter, I looked no older than my 23 years and the whole scene would have made me feel supremely uncomfortable.
It would have been nice for me to do anyways.

So a lesson was learned I suppose.
Even in a city where we have to be crammed in with so many strangers: in elevators, subway cars, city streets and restaurants
wanting nothing to do with next to all of them.
It just made me feel like an asshole
for getting so irritated with a man, just because he procreated
and with a girl, just because she liked dogs.