Glass with butterfly wings

It would be curious to know to what measure the legends of the past, the superstitions, the miracles and magic were explainable by the curious power of randomness to conjure up the unlikely. When you think that the proverbial butterfly wings can churn up a hurricane, it might not cause much strain to believe that inadvertent acts can cause rather improbable outcomes that in turn from their sheer unlikeliness lead some to ponder whether there were mysterious forces at work. 

And thus was my weekend's intrigue. My wife and I were home and keen to take advantage of the apparent sunshine and blue skies by going on a loop walk to the village and back. I had my normal glasses but it was so sunny outside that I thought I'd head to the car to swap into my sunglasses. I opened the door, went in, put my normal glasses in the divider between the car seats where I kept my sunnies, shut and locked the car and left.

It was a pleasant day but it quickly turned eventful as Christy, after posing for a picture beside a lush cricket oval, received her first ever bee-sting. Fortunately there was a well stocked first-aid kit in the shed next to the oval; there were tweezers; they had a cream for the sting; and we left the area quickly for lunch. We went to a cute Italian restaurant I'd been meaning to go to and then we went home for a brief rest before we got in the car for some more distant errands. 

When we got in the car nothing seemed awry. We drove first to a shop to buy Metamucil. I went into the back seat to grab a shopping bag, because not many places have carry bags any more. I also grabbed an umbrella from the backseat because the weather had clouded over and it was starting to spit. Fortunately the rain was never heavy and I didn't use the umbrella in the end. We got to the shop. I put our purchases into the shopping bag, threw both the umbrella and the purchases into the back of the car and then it was off to the Chinese supermarket. The weather was fine, yet again, and we vege-shopped, picked up the dry-cleaning and then drove home. And it was when we got home that something weird was noticed. I went to switch my sunnies back to my normal glasses, but there were no glasses in the divider.

At first I didn't tell my wife. To be upfront, for all my apparently normal intelligence and cognitive functions, I can be very absent-minded. No person wants to hear the groans from others for yet another misplaced wallet, phone or set of keys. I wanted to check if I'd somehow managed to take them up to the flat but a casual check of the house, my pockets, the shopping bag with the Metamucil and then a not so casual look in the car through the divider, side pockets, glove compartment, boot, backseats and ground around the car failed to come up anything besides a lot of general rubbish. The car was pretty clean inside by the end! 

I went up to the flat and admitted to my wife that something had disappeared. She didn't groan. We generally pieced together the same sequence of events that led to the present time. We both knew the glasses had to be in the car. My wife ransacked the car for good measure with no outcome. At no point during the earlier drive had I changed to my normal glasses but perhaps, we thought, I somehow pocketed them and then dropped them? Had I even put them in the car in the first place? we pondered. Perhaps I had got the sunglasses out but pocketed the normal ones on the walk before the drive, only to remove them from my pocket and place them on the restaurant table, from where I left them. None of the actual physically possible scenarios were plausible. (A walk by of the restaurant confirmed that implausibility was not to be the case.) But there must have been some sequence of events that lead to the situation. My glasses had completely vanished from a locked place where they should have been. 

I slept that night without knowing where they were. We got up the next day planning to have our normal Sunday but also with a brief scout of the Metamucil shop and the Chinese supermarket. First I took my wife to the gym while I had coffee. While there, another grand fine day crumbled into messy rain. After her workout, we got back to the car but as we drove to Dominion Rd for lunch, the heavens were clearly breached and a Singaporean monsoon came down on Epsom. By the time we parked, the rain had stopped but I still decided to grab the umbrella just in  case and we went to a new noodle house ("A Noodle Less Ordinary"). There I leaned the umbrella against the wall and we had our noodles and left.

It was on the way to the car that, holding the umbrella horizontally, I felt through the synthetic material that there was something unusual inside the unopened umbrella.

I knew what it was immediately. 

It was ridiculous. 

How my glasses came to be in there was beyond me. We'd never opened the umbrella at any stage over the two days and it was never near the divider between the front seats. The umbrella had just lain on the back seat and was always been put back on the back seat when returned. If the glasses had been in the umbrella from the get-go, we'd taken the umbrella out twice and there were plenty of opportunities for it to fall out both on Saturday and Sunday, yet it appeared in the umbrella just then, safe and sound.

It was just like a magician pulling a rabbit from behind your ear, where it had been all along.

It was reminiscent of a time in our first year back. We went to the Butterfly Valley near Thames. It was a nice little excursion. Butterflies galore, as you'd imagine. We wanted to get a fridge magnet butterfly for Mum, so Christy chose and bought one and put it in her handbag. I saw her. Even the shop assistant saw her. We went straight to the car where Christy proceeded to open her bag to play with it but could not find it there at all. Mystified, we retraced our footsteps, even asked the shop assistant whether she recalled where we put the butterfly. (She recalled it had gone straight in the handbag.) We checked the floor. The path. And we both ransacked the car. 

But that butter had flown. 

It is a story we often tell. We never found a trace of the butterfly since then. If only I knew then what I know now and checked the umbrella.