I love living here.  I have written about the many positives I have found.  However, there are some negatives and we just experienced one of the most negative.  One late afternoon this week I left the garage door open for about half an hour.  A neighbour rang the bell to let us know.  We closed it and we didn’t think any more about it.  Then the power went off.  I had to go to rehearsal so I took Dale’s car, it was outside and that was easier than wiggling between the cars to get to the pull cord to manually open the garage door so I could get the Bug out.

In the morning the power was still out and I had to drive to Maple Ridge to meet up with a friend to head to a ladies lunch sponsored by Dale’s work. Dale thoughtfully moved my Bug out of the garage for me before he went to work.  And that’s when he noticed.  We had been robbed.

While the garage door was open, someone went into my car and removed my Bluetooth GPS and my Sirius satellite radio receiver.  They took an iPod and a Bose docking station, a battery charger and our bikes from the garage. That was probably all they could carry.  The RCMP officer who came when we filed our claim said they probably made their getaway on them.

There are 5 townhouses in our building; four of them have been affected by property crime.  The family in Unit 1 had their car broken into.  The people in Unit 2 had someone enter their home though a closed but unlocked front door and steal things, while their daughter was upstairs.  The garage door on Unit 4 was also left open for a while and things were taken.

I am always very careful to close the garage door when I leave it.  I stop the car, close the door and then say. “The garage door is closed”, so I have a memory of doing it.  Too often in the past I did it on auto-pilot and then couldn’t remember if I had done it or not.  Usually I look in my rear view mirror as I drive away, and again I say out loud that the garage door is closed.  I wasn’t as “in the moment” when I came into the garage, obviously.  And that day I had been in and out of the garage all day, waiting for the city to empty our garbage can, which they didn’t.

So, the lesson?  Well the obvious one is to be careful.  We live in an urban area with lots of homeless people moving in and out of the area all day long.  We see them on the benches in the park in front of our building.  And for a while, we saw them camping in the overgrown gardens just down the path from us. With no means of support, they have to steal to survive.  And if we let down our guards, or are forgetful, they will take advantage of us.

We were angry, of course.  We had been violated and the things we had worked hard to get, or that had been given to us by loved ones, had been taken.  My response was to lock everything and remove all temptation from sight.  I took the garage door opener out of the car and locked the door between the house and the garage.  Dale was having none of that though, he wasn’t going to live barricaded in his house.  So, the opener went back and the door became unlocked.  I was also upset.  It was my fault that it happened.  I left the garage door open.  I should know better.  I had heard of the other problems here.  I had seen the people in our neighbourhood on their bikes, pulling shopping carts.  I knew they were out there, and I should have known they were watching.  For a couple of days I found myself sitting on the window seat, eyeing everyone who walked or rode by.  I saw someone going into the gardens of the building across the street, pulling something in a garbage bag into the bushes.  I reported that to the police officer who came to follow up with our phone report.  He checked it out and said that it was the gardener putting leaves there to use as mulch later.  I hated that I was so suspicious.  So I decided to change my mindset.

Instead of being angry that someone had stolen from us, I started to think about how it would feel to be the person stealing from us.  That can’t be a good feeling, to know that you are taking things from people.  But obviously the person who did it had no other options, or at least he (and I know my bias is showing but we rarely see homeless women sitting on the park benches) felt he had no other options.  That’s the rub.  We have a homeless problem in BC.  There are people living on the streets, for whatever reason, and I am not aware of the support systems that are available to help them.  I know I hear on the news that agencies are closing their doors, or shutting down programs.  And even though I have seen homeless people, I didn’t really think about them until my life was affected.

Maybe the lesson for me is to be thankful that I have things that are worth taking and that we can afford to replace them.  Maybe I’m being pushed to be involved in being a part of the solution, either through some of the agencies or charities or by being active politically. Maybe I’m being told to give more.  The other day a young man stopped me outside of Safeway asking for some change.  I didn’t have any change, only twenties from the cash machine I had just used.  Would giving him $20 have meant one night when he didn’t have to look for an open garage?  Who knows, but I’m thinking that if the person, or people, who took those things from my car and our garage had had some money, they wouldn’t have needed to steal.