Karma Steamroller

It came to me in a dream. I was seeing a room full of sundry dusty items, most of which were heaped upon what I recognized as a gold Saturn station wagon. That was what tipped me in the direction of the theme for this room: Lost. I didn't recognize many of the items because of their shifting, dreamish quality, but the car was the one we had given up to the universe some years back, stolen out from under our Father's Day outing, never to be seen again. Other cars have been stolen from our sphere of awareness, but this one didn't show up as anything but a ghost just before dawn. From the depths of sleep, I was making relief out of the freshly opened wounds, the ones I though had long since healed. They stole my bike.
"They." The bad guys. By definition: thieves. I want to make it plural because such a heinous crime could not be carried out by just one person. I suppose to be fair, since that seems important now, I should implicate myself for leaving my primary mode of transportation in the hallway of the school. After hours. Unlocked. On the way out, at the end of a very long day as PE coach for a sea of elementary school kids, I stopped in the office to check out with my principal. I was only going to leave the bike there for a moment while I filled my boss in on the day's events. I left my helmet hanging, as it has for decades, on the handlebars.
I stayed longer than I had planned. When I stepped back into the hall, I looked left and right. No bicycle. The gift of all these years gave me a faint hope that someone might have rolled it into the faculty lounge, like they had once before to keep it from being stolen. "They" in this case would be the good guys, the ones who were looking out for me and keeping my stuff safe.
My bike. The one my wife gave to me on Valentine's Day so many years ago, with the lovely sentiment, "We may never own a new car, but you can have a new bike." That spoke volumes about our commitment to one another and the choice I had made to serve my community as a teacher. There was no company car attached to this gig, but there was all kinds of karmic grace.
At least that's what I thought before I had my heart forcibly removed via theft. Rip. Tear. Biking to work every day was an outward sign of my connection to the good I was doing. I can console myself with the idea that whoever took my Raleigh C40 Hybrid, my trusted steed for so many years, needed it more than I did. For a moment. Then the feeling of being abused by a universe that doesn't really care about fair returns.
I recognized the room in my dream. It was the basement of the Alamo.