Breaking windows

It was around 1:30 in the afternoon on Thursday when I heard the doorbell. It was a police officer standing in the misty rain, asking if I was the owner of a black Toyota. It had been broken into, he said, and the address came back as mine. I followed him to my car half a block away. The front passenger window was gone, shattered into a million pieces.

As I gave the cop my insurance information and he filed his report, I wondered aloud what the thief could have been thinking, to risk so much for so little, and in the middle of the day on a well-trafficked two-way street, no less. The cop didn’t have any theories, or if he did, he kept them to himself.

The tape on the hospital’s surveillance camera across the street didn’t catch anything, and for all I know, the thief got off scot free. Of course, he didn’t get much. He got a couple of pockets of change -- ten, maybe twenty bucks. He got my phone charger and my iPod connector cable. He jacked up my CD player but couldn’t take it with him. And apparently he got something black from my trunk, though after taking a look in there -- laden as it is with lingering odds and ends like a boogie board and tennis rackets and my grad school graduation gown from the summer of 2009 – it beats me what he got.

I know he got something from my trunk, though, because as I left for the autoglass place for a temporary window (which, as I came to learn, is nothing more than glorified shrinkwrap), the woman who had called the cops, a neighbor I’d seen before but never met, came out and told me the story. She described a Hispanic guy in his forties, who she spotted through her curtains stuffing his pockets frantically. “He didn’t seem right,” she told me. “I don’t know if he was on drugs or something, but he wasn’t right.”

He wasn’t right.

In the time that’s passed since the break-in I’ve been wondering about this man, this thief who wasn’t right. And that initial question – what was he thinking? – has evolved. Sure, I still wonder why he took the risk. But I wonder more than that. I wonder what was going through his head when he put his elbow or his hammer or his fist through the glass. When he saw the Franciscan cross hanging from the rearview mirror, Christ the innocent one being crucified for the sin of the world – for his sin and mine – did the thief have second thoughts? In his quest for change in the center console, stuffing his pockets with pennies and nickels and quarters and dimes, he found another cross, a Celtic one, which he left on the passenger seat amid glass and a few straggling pennies. I wonder what he thought when he saw a recent copy of La Voz Hispana on the backseat, a local Spanish language newspaper he very well may read when he’s at home, wherever home for him happens to be, if he has one. And of course, I have to wonder what he was thinking, when he saw it in the back: my VHS copy of My Oh My!, that utterly amazing, tear-jerking portrayal of the Seattle Mariners’ magical 1995 season, which I recently rediscovered in my parents’ basement.

I don’t know what the guy was thinking, or if he was at that moment capable of very much thought at all. I don’t know what has driven him to this, or who, for that matter. I don’t know where he lays his head at night, if he lays his head anywhere in particular. I don’t know where he was headed when he took off running, pockets jangling, between the hospital and the cemetery. I don’t know where he’ll end up, or where he is even now.

Since the break-in, while driving in a car suddenly drafty, devoid of music except for the flapping of the glorified shrinkwrap, I think of this man and of myself and I keep coming back to one thing. As much as I’d like to get my stuff back and be able to listen to music again and not have to worry about rain getting on the upholstery; as much as I’d like to think I’m better than this guy and that he’s a lost cause; as much, as much, as much, I keep coming back to one haunting, sobering, ultimately amazing thought: There but for the grace of God go I.

And so I pray. I pray believing that the prayer is already being answered all around us, every day, even when all we see is a disregarded cross and a million pieces of broken glass. The prayer is simple.

Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy on us.
Amen.

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