What The Thieves Did Not Steal

A Boxing Day adventure.

About a decade ago as I tried to do a year-end wrap-up on my old blog, I realized that the contents of my messenger bag acted as a guide to the year. As I stood over the things we were able to retrieve from a field where the thieves that stole our car last week dumped what they didn’t want, I had something of the same realization. But I won’t submit you to the now very extensive list.

The three boxes in the back of my car, the hat I can never manage to lose, my laptop, novel manuscript and notebook.

We were at the end of a trip to Hudson, WI, where we’d spent Christmas with my husband’s family there. We engaged in the usual festive eating and drinking, and Dustin, my husband, had a special mission as well—to officiate the marriage of his Uncle Jack and Aunt Brenda, who have been together for over 40 years. I had a shopping spree on Christmas Eve at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis that was a favorite moment, rushing in to get Catherine Barnett’s new book of poems for Dustin, a Christmas present I knew he would love—and he did—and then as I glanced around I grabbed seven other books and their t-shirt, which had a sloth I love.

My Christmas eve spree.

And then on Boxing Day, we flew back through Montreal, a favorite city with an international airport three hours from our house, with cheaper fares this winter than Boston had for the same destination—we’d saved $400, the price of another ticket or two. We met up with friends there for a magical post-holiday dinner at a restaurant called Heni, a night organized by my friend, the writer Sruti Islam, who brought her friend Adam and our friend the editor Hillary Brenhouse, who is launching a new magazine called Elastic in March of 2025. She had told me about her plans for a psychedelic magazine the year before when we saw her in London and now it is real, with work from Aimee Bender, Johanna Hedva, Daniel Saldańa Paris, Samantha Hunt, Hala Alyan, Melissa Broder, and many others. The theme of the first issue is Dying.

We parked our car across the street and went in for the magical dinner. And when it was over, we walked out to the quiet street and I saw the car was gone.

Montreal, as we learned from a few different people (including the police), has experienced a surge in car theft. So far our car has not been found but we’re holding out a slim hope. The thieves threw away what they didn’t want in a field about 20 minutes from the restaurant, which I learned from my Find My app on my phone, which located my computer, a location I gave to the police. They did take Dustin’s snowmobile boots and two pairs of ski gloves in addition to the car, which struck me as a fairly Canadian kind of theft, to be honest, and left behind the books I’d just bought as well as the books that had been in the car for several months—two boxes of books I was taking to my office and a third box, of ARCs from 2020-2022, that I usually donate from to little free libraries in Hanover. I suppose I am an accidental bookmobile.

Also in the bags were my laptop, the annotated manuscript of my new novel, and the red notebook of notes I’d taken about that novel. I experienced the shock of being relieved to get back the notes and the manuscript before I had entirely processed that they had just been in a field. And I was reunited with some of my favorite t-shirts, which, if you know me, you know I am living this life one message t-shirt at a time.

Me, very happy in my sister-in-law’s bathroom, modeling my new shirt, which did come back to me.

I’m of course sad about the loss of the car and the prospect of never getting it back, but signing a form at a police station in Montreal for the return of our things, unpacking them hurriedly because they’d been packed up, in some cases, with snow that still hadn’t melted, that was much harder for me. It did confirm for me, though, that thieves don’t really want most of what I love in this life.

We stayed two nights, taking an inventory, picking broken glass out of our things that had been abandoned in the field and speaking to the police, the insurance company, the car company and so on. We weren’t able to sleep much but I did at least get to console myself with Sruti at Bistro La Franquette the next night, a favorite restaurant there she introduced me to. Their burger, oysters, carrot cake, some shots from the bartender and a whisky sour nightcap, all helped shield me from the sadness. And on the last morning, Hillary, who had driven us around that first night until 4AM, sent us off with some St. Viateur bagels, my favorite there. For all the heaviness, I left feeling loved by friends.

We then drove off in an epic back and forth, 14 hours total, taking a rental car home to Vermont, then driving back with our car and the rental car to return the rental car, finding the rental car return garage full and then bargaining for an extra spot to drop it off, and then driving home, in our surviving car. The one-way rentals to America had been booked up due to the holidays. Border crossing guards all offered their consolations when we described our melancholy errand, and filled us in a little more on the increased frequency of car theft there. Each trip, thanks to Google Maps, was a distinctly different trip as well, so we learned the terrain as we went, listening all the while to Parker Posey’s You’re On A Plane, her funny, sharp and poignant memoir, which she also reads from—an epic one-woman show—and when I was alone I listened to Tricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy, which she also reads, a differently funny, sharp and poignant memoir which felt like Tricia Lockwood sitting on my shoulder, whispering just to me. The two audiobooks were like a time machine of sorts, suspending the hours so that it didn’t feel like all that much time had passed by the time we lugged our things back inside our home.

I did laugh to find among the things the thieves rejected a hat my Aunt Priscilla gave me for Christmas some time in the late 90s, an L. L. Bean wool hat with one blue stripe and one green one, fleece lined, very warm, that seems determined to stay with me. I lose other hats but never this one. It is not particularly stylish or handsome, like those lost hats, but it remains. Some things just decide they belong to you.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee