(Submitted by reader Thomas Brown)
In the fifth grade, living in Seattle, WA, my best friend and I were on the same little league team and one Saturday had hopped on our bikes and rode down to the park for our game. Typical of the times and our age, we just let our bikes drop in the grass near the dugout and proceeded to warm up and then played ball.
After the game, to my friend’s dismay, someone had stolen his bike. I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I vowed to find it and hopped on my bike and started riding in no particular direction. I came to one of many apartment buildings some ways away and went in and around the back where, lo and behold someone had locked up my friend’s bike to a railing (it still had all my friend’s decals on it — it was really his bike). I pedaled like crazy back to my friend’s house and his dad drove us back out, with a pair of bolt cutters, and we simply stole the bike back.
Out of all the homes and apartment buildings in a two or three mile radius of that park, I somehow picked the exact right direction to go and right building to turn into (I was not methodically searching and none of us saw the bike being take and ridden away). The Odds were truly Crazy that day!
[EDITOR: Vigilante justice combined with sheer dumb luck, or was our submitter IN ON IT THE WHOLE TIME?!?! Nah, probably just sheer dumb luck.]
I thought the story was going to end with the bike not being his at all, but had the same decals.
I prefer to think that sometimes Angels lead us.
And many do. But what we typically find is when you look at these things from further back and you realize how most of the time the bike is never found, or found after hours of searching, etc., there’s always something at the extreme ends of the bell curve. Statistically someone is GUARANTEED to find the bike on the first try. And to them, it’s miraculous, but statistically it would be stranger if it never happened.