So hand in glove I stake my claim. I'll fight to the last breath.

What I can't remember is if I still had my gloves on when I saw the bottle of pee.

Wait. Let me back up.

Here's what happened. I lost one of my delightful turquoise gloves. Betty gave them to me, and I've been wearing them for years, and they fit perfectly even though I have such short figures that most gloves have too much room at the ends, and they're turquoise!

And now, now I only have one.

I've lost one of them three times, and always gotten it back. A friend who had happened to stop by just after I lost one the first time had spotted it down the street on the way to our house. The next time, I'd fortunately dropped it in my office. The third time, a man in a crosswalk saw me drop it.

Thrice-lost...nobody says fourth time is a charm, do they?

Anyway, it's not that the bottle of urine figures largely into the story, except that I was retracing my path to work, and it occurred to me that it would be helpful to be able to remember when I took off my gloves. Before or after the pee at 16th and O?

Typically, I would know exactly where I walked, because until recently I walked the exact same way back and forth every day. So Nick was wondering why I went down 16th Street, I said so I wouldn't get kidnapped.

He smirked at me.

"No, really. Because of that recent incident with that woman who was forced into a van at knife-point and then sexually assaulted."

"Then what happened?"

"The guy dropped her off."

"I hope she was at least closer to her destination."

They didn't say. Clearly shoddy reporting.

Anyway. Sexual assault is not funny. And as friends have said, I'm the kind of oblivious person who will wind up dragged into the back of a van. So I decided it was probably best to mix up my route.

Good for not getting kidnapped. Bad in terms of retracing steps.

Not that I think I'm all kinds of important and likely to get premeditatedly kidnapped. Just, more, who knows? Plus it's boring to walk the same way every day when you know where you're going.

But back to the pee. A bottle of urine! A large bottle. Like one of those big glass orange juice type bottles.

I mean, I didn't examine it closely or open it and smell it. But I have seen plenty of pee in a cup at this point, and in fact almost knocked an entire shelf of pee-filled cups on myself, thank you very much, and I can tell you that this, my friends, is a bottle of strong pee. I use the present tense because it was still there this morning, and I'm going to doubt it's been picked up by a passer-by.

You know, that makes me think maybe I should've peed on my gloves as a precaution. Although then I'd have been wearing urine-soaked gloves. So forget it.

But it made me wonder. Such volume! Was this multiple pees' worth? Or does someone have that large a bladder? Is it vendetta pee? I figure if you were homeless, you'd just pee in an alley, no? That seems to be the norm in our neighborhood.

Seriously. We're always saying, "Jordan, don't touch that! It has pee pee on it!" Because we are certain it does.

So basically, if you see a turquoise glove, could you grab it and let me know?