Thursday Afternoon Mystery Theater

The craziest thing happened today.

Josh and Layla had gone on a walk around our house to go "exploring" and wound up coming home with a treasure. While walking by a dirt field, Josh had glanced over and noticed a dusty briefcase resting on the ground, partially open with it's contents flapping around (Josh is the one that always sees something on the ground. Seriously, dude misses nothing. But I digress...).Josh was curious, so he brought it home so we could take a closer look and maybe figure out who it belonged to.

I have to interject here and just let you guys know that by this point, I was having a full-on Jason Bourne experience. I felt like Liam Neison was about to break down my door. It was awesome.

Anyway, when we opened it up we found little hand written letters to a guy (we'll call him Bob, naturally, to protect his identity) from his girlfriend (we'll call her Jane), all from 1986. We read them (don't judge! you know you would have read them too!) and learned that Jane was a freshman at college and her boyfriend Bob was a high school senior. Evidently, Bob didn't like that Jane was away at school and they broke up. Then Jane got a little boiled bunny about the situation, but probably got over it. It's a very tragic story. If you're fourteen.

Oh, and Jane mentioned her birthday was March 3rd, which is our anniversary. Which made me feel like Jason Bourne all over again.

So, Josh and I were all set to throw the briefcase away, when our imaginations started to get the best of us. What if Bob had been murdered? By Jane? And the briefcase was there because she rid his home of all evidence of her? Or, what if Bob had lost these precious memories by accident? And he was desperate to have them back?

There was no phone number for Bob in the briefcase. So Bob got Googled. And man, there are a lot of Bobs in the world. So we dug around more and discovered that there was a Bob who had moved to Albuquerque from the same town that our Bob was from. Bob had a Facebook page. Jackpot.

While we debated over whether or not to write to Bob, we took a look through his friends (wow, this story is really showing our nosy side...hmmm...) just to make sure it was the same Bob. While we did, we talked about how weird it was to know something personal about a perfect stranger. At one point Josh turned to me and said, "I bet we know more about that guy in this respect than all 200 of his Facebook friends." He's probably right.

By the way, in case you're wondering, Bob is not Facebook friends with Jane. We checked.

I hate to tell you, but the end of this story turns out a bit anti-climatic. We decided not to write to Bob. Suddenly, knowing he was alive and well, our over-active imaginations came up with entirely new scenarios. What if Bob was making a fresh start and he just wanted to chuck that briefcase into a field and be done with it? It's closure. Okay, maybe not eco-friendly closure, but closure nonetheless.

In the end, we threw the briefcase out. It may not have been the crazy chase scene, hanging out the window and shooting at the car behind us, Angelina Jolie style. Nothing self-destructed. But it was fun anyway. And much less stressful.