A Mystery of Sorts

I’ve been puzzling over something since yesterday afternoon.

When I went to pick Rea up from soccer, I was following behind a couple of cars and they straddled something on the road in front of me. I drove over the item as well and after I had passed by it, I glanced back in my rear view mirror and I was very surprised to see that it was an aluminum walking cane.

Now, there are a lot of things you come to expect to see in the middle of the road…dead tires, flat animals, shoes, car parts, just to name a few. But a CANE? My first thought was where in the world was the cane’s owner? I scanned the road ditches and didn’t see anybody. Had some pedestrian just been hit and emergency personnel left the cane lying in the road? I didn’t see any evidence of that. There was a flattened squirrel nearby, but I’m pretty sure that cane wasn’t his size.

Nobody in front of me even braked or noticed the cane – so I kept driving too.

I came right back through the same way about ten minutes later and the cane was gone – had some elderly cane owner been lurking at the roadside waiting for the traffic to stop so they could “rush” out and retrieve their cane? Did some opportunist see it and think “Hey, I’ve been wishing for a decent cane” and stop and get it? Could be that a roaming pack of boys found the cane and it’s now a formidable sword.

Or better yet, did some Good Samaritan see it, and maybe it’s propped up against a light pole like a hubcap and I just missed it…