Natalie arrived home after taking her first quarter finals a UCLA in a sleep-deprived, zombie-like state on Friday evening. Because Gerard and I were planning to attend a memorial service for a co-worker the next morning we asked Natalie to drive Rachel to an appointment in Pasadena on Saturday morning. Natalie warned that she was out of practice driving and did not want to drive any unfamiliar routes until she was used to driving again. I felt that in typical fashion she was just trying to get out of waking up early.
Around 9:30 a.m. Gerard, me and Hannah left for the memorial service, and Natalie and Rachel left for Pasadena (Tessa had already been dropped off at Layla's house for a playdate). Shortly after we got seated at the memorial service, Natalie called and told us tearfully, "I lost the passenger-side mirror." I asked, "What do you mean, you LOST the passenger-side mirror?" "I got confused and thought I was lost and I was yelling at Rachel and when we arrived, we noticed the mirror was missing." I told her we couldn't talk right now and that she could explain it to me fully when we got home. When we got home I got the same story from both Rachel and Natalie, except that Rachel remembers she might have heard a teensy noise at some point.
After lunch, Gerard and I decided to retrace their route and see if we could find the broken off side mirror in order to reconstruct what had happened. We drove along slowly and finally saw it two blocks before their last turn. We found three pieces of the assembly but some other pieces were missing. The plastic housing had clearly taken the impact because it had a huge piece missing. Two parts were in the street and one part was on the grass near the curb. It was very obvious that they had gotten too close to a parked car and the mirror had been sheared off by impacting something on the parked car. There was a parked car near where we found our mirror, but that car was unscathed so probably whomever they hit had driven off, probably after collecting their broken mirror parts.
Our girls were clearly oblivious to what they did, but maybe we will be hearing from someone who witnessed the severing of the mirror.
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