Ethan's Mets blue and orange baseball cap and mit caught my attention. "We're going to an M's game so maybe we should bring these on the trip," I thought. So I grabbed these last two items on my way out the door as we departed on our road trip to see Ojiichan and Obaachan.
Arriving home nine days later, we checked the front steps for delivered packages. There weren't any, but Dorothy and I were hoping that there would be one.
We had called once while in Seattle to ask if a small boy's baseball cap had been turned in by one of the cleaning ladies. The front desk person who answered Dorothy's call was not too pleasant. Dorothy did not want to call again, but she relented to my prodding. She placed a second call to the Windmill Inn of Roseburg the next day and was greeted by someone who seemed to care that there was a heartbroken little boy who missed his hat. She noted our name and address and said that if the hat was found it would be mailed to us.
In Seattle, to make up for the lost cap, Obaachan bought a new M's cap for Ethan at the ballgame. He did not let this cap out of his sight.
We said our goodbyes and headed home on Friday exactly a week to the last day that we could remember Ethan with his Mets cap. Driving through Cottage Grove about an hour or so north of Roseburg, we stopped to check the Dairy Queen. This was the only other place between the Windmill Inn and Portland where we could've left the cap, but we didn't have any photos from the Dairy Queen to verify if Ethan was wearing the cap. He definitely was not wearing the cap during our short visit at the fire station in Cottage Grove because we had photos from the visit. It was the same staff at the Dairy Queen. They only had a red cap.
So we arrived home on Sunday night after two day of traveling. We reasoned that maybe someone would have a good heart and turn in the cap. After all, it had his name written on the inside and even his uniform number, #1. But it had been a week now. Who would turn in such a small seemingly meaningless item?
We get packages from time-to-time. Sometimes we have to sign for the package. Other times the delivery person just knocks on our door and leaves the package for us. This time the UPS man just knocked and by the time the door was answered, the only item remaining was a Otis Spunkmeyer box. This looked odd, but on closer inspection there was a Windmill Inn return address. Dorothy's immediate thought was, "It's the cap!" And so it was.
Ethan was away to his karate camp so he was not able to have this same immediate sense of recovery at the package's arrival. However, later in the day, Ethan was grateful that there was someone at the Windmill Inn in Roseburg who cared about his cap just as much as he did.
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