This past Friday, my friend Julie stopped in for a visit on her way to regions farther north. Julie and are kindred spirits in this sense: we are both well in tune with our own neuroses. They are a part of our make-up and we do not hide from them. Rather, we understand and embrace them. We are at one with them. And if an awareness of one's self, an honest insight into one's own personality, signifies a kind of wisdom, then I'd argue we are downright sagely.

Julie and I shared an apartment in Lexington, VA the summer after our junior year of college. It was a difficult summer for both of us. We each were involved in separate co-dependent, completely unhealthy, romanti-- no, that's not the right word, ah!-- purely sexual relationships. Nothing romantic about them really, unless you equate romance with mental anguish. To make matters worse, we were cooped up in a town of less than 7,000 people and were working dull jobs for minimum wage. Not a good scenario. But we made the most of it.

For me, it was a tremendous comfort to have Julie's company that summer, especially when I became incapacitated with one of the worst back-spasm episodes of my life. M-W calls a spasm 'an involuntary and abnormal contraction of muscle or muscle fibers or of a hollow organ.' This was certainly involuntary, altogether abnormal, and the whole experience made me feel like a 'hollow organ.' So yes, I had a back spasm. Until that point, I never thought I'd be 'one of those people' who would be sidelined from life, flat on his back, unable to move, especially not at age 21. I popped Advil like savory little candies and stared at the ceiling in my bedroom until I needed to take a leak, at which point I would crawl toward the restroom door and Julie would help me stand and go inside, then wait outside until I was done. It was not pretty. But to this day I'm grateful to Julie for her help.

Unfortunately, in addition to the minor neuroses that crop up now and again that make us want to analyze and question every decision we make, Julie and I have a talent for attracting minor disasters. I mean, this is a girl who got married in a hurricane - Charley, '04, yo! - and a guy who, despite all his best efforts to be an upstanding citizen, has had to pay almost $1,000 in traffic and parking tickets over the last year.

So it was not a surprise to me when, as we were all about to leave our apartment this past Saturday morning - Cath and I for the mall to do Christmas shopping, and Julie to New York to see more friends - I heard Julie call from the living room in a semi-panicked tone, 'Where's my wallet?'

"Oh, no."

"This is weird. I can't find it."

"Not good."

"Wallet gone."

What ensued was a frantic all-hands-on-deck search for the missing wallet. At least for Julie and me.

Catherine, God love her, tried to be rational: "When did you see it last?" Poor thing. She just didn't understand. This was no time for analysis or empirical investigation. Clearly, this was a time for furious flipping over of seat cushions and frantic flinging of clothes from luggage.

"Did you take a cab home last night?"

"Yes." She had stayed out a little later than us and had come home via cab.

"So you had it then."

"Shit. The cab!"

Visions passed through my brain of what the rest of Julie's week might look like: canceling credit cards, replacing her drivers license, a world of shit. Poor Julie. What a way to start a vacation.

"Either that, or you dropped it between the cab and the front door of the building."

"I'm on it!" I said, and headed downstairs to check the sidewalk. It had been a good 7 hours since Julie had come back to the apartment building. If the wallet was dropped outside, it certainly would not be there now. Still, it was worth checking. I walked from the curb to the front door twice, but alas, no wallet.

When I came back upstairs, Cath and Julie were looking up numbers for cab companies.

Julie called her husband, Jesse. "You'll never guess what I did." There was a long pause. Then an excited gasp from Julie. This seemed to indicate that Jesse actually could guess what she had done. In fact, he had received a phone call from somebody in the dark hours of the morning who had found the wallet. He just hadn't had a chance to call Julie and tell her, mainly because he hadn't woken up yet.

We jotted down the two numbers that this good samaritan had left. It took several phone calls, and a confusing conversation with a concierge, who we thought was a phone operator at a cab company, before we got the full story: one of my neighbors from a nearby building found Julie's wallet on the sidewalk on the way back to his apartment and was nice enough to pick it up, locate Julie's number on the checkbook inside, and call her home.

His name is Tim. He lives in the building where I can sometimes watch TV from my bathroom while I pee. We never wound up meeting Tim because he was on his way to New York that morning. Julie spoke to him on his cell. She let him know that he rocked, big time. They laughed over the fact that they both were heading to New York. "I knew I should have brought the wallet with me!"

The concierge in Tim's building, the one we had mistakenly taken for a cab company operator on the phone earlier, let Julie up to Tim's apartment to get her wallet. I wish I had gone with her, because I'm curious if Tim's is the apartment from which I sometimes catch glimpses of The Colbert Report from my bathroom window. Perhaps it's better not to know.

It's funny how something can happen like a lost wallet and suddenly the world can seem large and malevolent, entirely hopeless. But then all that can change from a single act. A small isolated moment in time can disrupt our insular lives and bring us into contact with the outside world in ways we weren't expecting. It fascinates me: the fact of this wallet, this inanimate object, separated from owner, stranded on a sidewalk in the middle of a large city, found by a complete stranger, ultimately returned to owner. It seems improbable. Serendipitous. Like it was all intended to unfold in just that way, at just that time. Sometimes I think we're all just like the wallet - no control, just existing from one moment to the next. Events like this lessen, to a degree, my predilection for neurotic anxiety and worry. They make me realize that every decision, every action, does not boil down to right or wrong, good or bad. In fact, the 'decision' might not exist at all.

That's easy for me to say now. But it won't stop me from cursing myself for being so stupid the next time I get a $100 parking ticket . . .

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