This past Monday, the night Scott passed, we packed up everything in his room to be brought home with his mom. (Oddly enough, we had earlier in the day already started packing away the nonessentials, anticipating that he would be soon transferred to palliative care.) When I picked up my coat to depart, I noticed my iPod nano was not where I had left it, which was in my inner coat pocket. Since my earphones had fallen out earlier, I presumed my iPod fell out of the pocket as well and hunted around the room for it, with no success. Thinking that it might have made its way into one of the packed bags, Gail said she would keep an eye out for it when she unpacked.
Now, that particular pocket actually has a hole towards the top, into which things could fall into the inner shell of the coat. I had patted down the coat and didn’t feel any foreign objects. Nor was the iPod to be found at home (on the off chance that I didn’t actually bring it with me). Ready to write it off as a loss–after all, it’s just a thing and things can be replaced, the thought occurred to me that Scott might have… “borrowed” it for some music on the long walk that he had embarked upon. If he wanted it, he could have just asked me–and I would have made sure there was music on there that he’d actually like.
As we left the Fireside Grill tonight for a post-Pseudo meal, I reached into my pockets to pull out my gloves and felt something weird inside the coat. Feeling around, it was rectangular and very solid. After first thinking “what the hell is this?,” it came to me: it was my iPod. Immediately, I stuck my hand down that hole in the coat– and presto, the missing iPod. I yelled over to Mike R., who was familiar with the tale of the iPod-gone-missing: “Dude, do you know what I just found?” “NO WAY. Scott returned it to you!”
After sharing with Michael P. the joyous story of the reunion of a man and his gadget, we ultimately decided that Scott probably found the music on my iPod unacceptable.