A Strange Turn Of Events

Several years ago Number One Daughter was going to her Aunt's house.

At the time, we had a little Ford Escort station wagon for her to use.

Number One Daughter had, over time, amassed a pretty impressive collection of music CDs. She had these CDs in a big zip-up binder so that she could carry them in the car and listen to them.

On this particular day, as she was putting her stuff in the car, she apparently laid the CD case with $1000 worth of CDs on the roof of the car and then left, forgetting the CD case.

Later in the day she realized that she didn't have her CD case. Of course she was "sure" she had put it in the car with her, but it could not be found.

I told her that if she had laid it on top of the car and forgotten it, it could be somewhere between our house and her Aunt's house, so she walked that short distance back and forth a couple of times.

Still couldn't find it.

Thing is, I had recently started working with an engineer who had taken all of his music CDs and made copies onto inexpensive blank CDs so that he could carry them in the car and not have to worry whether they got stolen.

I had told her about this and had started the process of making a travelling copy of all of my CDs, and she had done a few, but the vast majority of her CDs were in that lost case.

Not only did she have the original CDs in there, but she had also put all of the CD booklets in there too, because she liked to look up and learn the lyrics to the songs she liked.

She was justifiably sick at the thought of having lost all the CDs she had bought over the years.

I told her that the only explanation for their loss was that the case had fallen on the street and someone had picked it up and carried it home with them.

I told her to go buy two large white poster boards and a black magic marker.

When she got home I had her write really large as to take up the entire poster paper, "Lost CD Case With CDs. 867-5307". (Of course that's not our real phone number. It's Jenny's.)

The CD case had been lost on a Sunday afternoon, and the sign was made and one poster paper placed on each side of our mail box beside the road on Monday.

My reasoning was that whomever had found the CD case might live in or visit someone in our neighborhood and had no idea how to return the case to the rightful owner.

Days went past and no one called. She was becoming resigned to the fact that all of her CDs were lost.

Then the next Monday, over a week after the CD case was lost, we received a phone call from a man who said they had found a CD case.

My daughter was able to rattle off a whole list of the CDs that were in there, ultimately to the satisfaction of the man that the case was indeed hers.

Lovely Wife took her over to the man's home who explained that his wife goes over to our neighborhood to visit a relative every Sunday and had seen the CD case lying in the road in front of our house and had stopped and picked it up.

It was the nest Sunday when she went to visit that they had seen the signs on our mail box and wrote down the number and called when they could.

The man told Number One Daughter that she had a really strange taste in music, that he and his wife had never heard of any of the bands the CDs were for.

Lovely Wife and Number One Daughter told him that they were Christian bands and that all of the CDs were Christian rock and contemporary Christian music bands.

So they came home with her case and all her CDs and the booklets for all of her CDs.

She eventually made copies of all of her CDs and used those in her car, knowing that if they were lost or stolen then it's not a big deal, she could make more.

I had done this very thing for many years with cassette tapes. I would buy CDs to listen to at home, but would make a copy onto a blank tape to play in the truck that I had at the time. The Supreme Court had ruled that you could make a copy for yourself as long as you weren't trying to copy copyrighted material to sell illegally. The same principle holds for making personal copies of CDs.

It was nice of the man and woman to call and return the CDs, and they wouldn't accept a reward for it either. But Lovely Wife got the impression that had the music been more mainstream, things this couple liked, they probably would have just said, "finders keepers, losers weepers."

Our family learned that listening to and buying Christian music CDs had other advantages than just simply lifting a persons spirit.