St Anthony, my Patron Saint

I have renewed faith in St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. I’ve always felt an affinity for the Saint – I bear the same name – but you could say I now have direct faith.

I had just acquired new hearing aids, at some cost, and after the second day of use they went missing. I was working late in the brewhouse, and all the machinations and clanging were a bit much, so I took the Beltones out and put them in my pocket. Later on, it was a busy night in the taproom, things got shall we say a little blurry.

Next morning the hearing aids were nowhere to be found. I remembered thinking that my pocket was probably not a good place for the Beltones, the question was what did I do with them. My trailer, no, the easy look turned up nothing, a deep dive would require hours; my desk in the brewhouse, nothing; my backpack, nada. It was the 4^th of July and I had a busy schedule so as I usually do, shrugged to myself, I’m sure they’ll present themselves when ready.

Sunday, Monday I was off site; I had put word out to brewery staff. Returning Tuesday still nothing. With a 2-week trip coming up I was beginning to get nervous. So I did something I hadn’t really done before. During my morning meditation I prayed to St. Anthony. Meditation is something I do most mornings – 20-30 minutes to slow the breathing and empty the mind. I suppose praying is much the same. In prayer you’re focusing one thing, God or whatever you want help with. The same in meditation, especially if you use a mantra. I focused on St. Anthony.

Within the hour, poking around in my trailer, I found a hearing aid. Unfortunately, it was not one of the ones I had just lost, it was a single one that had abandoned me months before. (I have an acoustic neuroma, which is a benign growth affecting my auditory nerve and hearing in my left ear.)

Nice try St. Anthony, I thought. But he didn’t desert me. A couple of hours later taking a break on my trailer recliner, I spotted them on the ground. They had been there through a rainy weekend but seemed to have survived.

I have lost a lot of things over the years, but in the majority of cases lost articles seem to come back to me. One of the more unlikely scenarios was the wallet I lost in Mexico. I periodically join some friends at a vacation trailer they share at a funky (in a good way) trailer park 90 minutes south of the border in Baja, Mexico. Oceanfront, beautiful.

On this occasion, upon arrival I opened my driver door and reached out to punch in the code for the gate. Next morning I couldn’t find my wallet. Searched everywhere, even by the gate. Asked  Angel, the camp owner, who said something about a gringo going back to the States, but he was pretty vague.

Then my wife got a call from someone in San Diego who said he had found my wallet by the side of a dirt road in Baja. Well, she was not unaccustomed to hearing unexpected news of my exploits, but this time it was, “Ok, he’s dead.” Cell phone service was not good at the Camp back then but when I could make contact, I was able to assure her that I was still very much in the land of the living; she informed me that my wallet was in the hands of someone in San Diego, a good Samaritan, who was in fact a retired cop. My wife, bless her, had already done her own detective work, contacted a friend and obtained the phone number of a mutual friend in San Diego. The friend and Samaritan met up and on my return to SD I was reunited with my wallet, contents intact.

Crossing the border back into the States could have been an issue since my Green Card was normally held in my wallet, but I had just been through the Citizenship process and had temporary documentation in my possession.

 I called the former cop and ascertained that my wallet had indeed fallen out of my car when I was dealing with the camp gate and he, failing to get any positive ID from Angel, figured the wallet’s owner, with an NJ drivers license, was on his way back to the US. He would not accept any reward.

On another occasion I was returning from a week-long deadline stint in Montreal. In the days of Ale Street News, I would travel to Montreal once every two months to “put the paper to bed” with our production manager Jeannine Marois. By the end of it, working 16-hour days or more I was usually a little brain dead. I was sitting in Trudeau airport with my laptop and charger out; when it came time to go to the gate, I unplugged the charger, put it in my backpack and got on the plane. About halfway home to Newark, I realized something was missing – my laptop.

Next day I called the airport, asked for lost property and sure enough they had it. Madame Marois was scheduled in New York for an event about a week later. She picked up the laptop and returned it to me.

All in all, I believe I was appropriately named.

*Addendum: When I have a chance to be the Samaritan, I’m happy to oblige. A few weeks ago in Barcelona, near the Sagrada Familia Cathedral, someone in the crowd just ahead of me dropped a credit card. I grabbed it and chased the guy down – he was wearing earplugs. I hadn’t seen it fall from his pocket, but I heard it hit the ground, testament to my newly purchased, newly found hearing aids.