I'm not a materialistic person.  Of all my possessions, the ones I value the most are not the most expensive or the ones with the highest re-sale value (though I'll gladly part with my 3,000-strong comic book collection for the right price).  If my house burned down and I lost everything I "owned," what would hurt the most would be the loss of pictures and mementos that wouldn't fetch a dollar at a yard sale.

When I walked onto our back porch and saw that my red Specialized Hardrock Sport was missing, I felt sick.  Missing is wrong; that makes it sound like I had misplaced it, or maybe it had run away.  It was gone, and someone had taken it.  Someone who didn't own it, hadn't paid for it, had never fixed a flat (twice), replaced a chain (once), re-gripped the handle bars (also once) and had never taken it in for a tune-up (annually), had decided that it was perfectly acceptable to hop the fence, climb on the porch and make-off with my bike.

Being 15 years-old, and well-ridden (that is, having more miles on it than a middle-age showgirl) the resale value on my little mountain bike couldn't have been more than 50 bucks.  I know times are tough for a lot of people (the middle class is shrinking faster than John Boehner's balls at a NARAL convention) and almost everyone I know is looking for ways to save and make more money, but stealing a man's bicycle? What next? Taking my son's toy tractor? Maybe they can take my beat-to-shit barbecue grill - I'm sure if they scraped the rust off they could get $20 for it...somewhere.

Maybe I'm romanticizing it because I've had it for so long, or maybe it's because that bike and I had covered nearly the entire lakefront and a good portion of the Chicago forest preserve system.  Maybe it's because my brother and I used to ride the 12 miles from the north side, arriving at the Taste of Chicago famished then gorge ourselves on ribs and cheesecake, burning off the calories on the ride bike (and stopping at Oak Street Beach to admire the scenery).  Maybe it's because my dad used to talk about his days as a teenager, living in Argentina in near-poverty, but feeling a transcendent freedom when he used to ride his bike.  

Or maybe it's the near-universal sense of violation that people feel when they've been violated by having some asshole sneaking around in the middle of the night and taking shit that doesn't belong to them.