Yachats Oregon Writer Rick Schultze

A couple of days after Christmas my girlfriend Crystal and I attended a Holiday party at the Bayshore home of a family from Canada who also own a home there. The family are regular visitors to the area and have many friends in Waldport, Bayshore and Yachats so it was quite a gathering. One couple owns a home in Eugene and in Bayshore and are also regular visitors to the area. Since most of the people in attendance have lived many places over the course of their lives the regular Holiday Season talk and geography were high on the agenda along with the variety of opinions on a plethora of subjects and topical news stories of the day. The mood was quite festive and the food prepared by the hosts was an outstanding buffet of local goodies; crab, salmon and other tasty delights and a fine spread of local wines and Canadian beer. Some of the people knew each other and for some like Crystal and me it was the first time we’d met the others so it was very enlightening and entertaining. It’s interesting how many stories you can hear if you just listen to the conversations in parties like these. For a writer it is as good as it gets; a natural way to observe the way people interact and talk to one another. Also at this party many of the attendees were animal lovers and talk about dogs filled the air on more than one occasion. So as the evening drew to an end everyone posed for group pictures, thanked the gracious hosts and grabbed hats, coats, purses and took off for their homes. Crystal and I were about to leave when she went to get her purse and it wasn’t where she thought she’d put it. I thought in might be out in my car so I went to look but it wasn’t there. We looked all over for it but it was nowhere to be found so Crystal and I headed home. I decided in the morning to go back to the party house to double check and when I got there they had a purse that I thought was Crystals. Well it wasn’t and didn’t have any identification in it. So we put our heads together and realized that one of the women at the party had probably picked up Crystals purse by mistake given they looked so much alike. The problem was figuring out which woman it was. The hosts don’t have a phone in their Bayshore home so we played the elimination game and came up with two possible cases of who might have the purse. The host and I went up the hill from their house to the home of the first option and lo and behold there was no one there. So I we went back to the party house and I left and went back up to the first house and left a note with my phone number on it. After a couple of hours I hadn’t heard anything and had to go to the store in Waldport so I drove back by the first house and saw the woman. She saw me and walked out saying “we figured it out. Their neighbor from across the street took the purse by mistake. She has it”. Whew, what a relief I knew where it was, right across the street from the party house. Only problem was when I got there there was nobody home! I went back to the party house and the host said he thought they had gone to Corvallis. So I went back to the house where the purse now resided and left a note with my number. Finally I went back to the party house to thank them for the party and to let them know I could be reached by phone when suddenly the garage door of the purse house opened and there stood the neighbor with the purse. “I grabbed with my coat and didn’t realize until I picked it up this morning that it wasn’t mine. They are almost identical”. Yes they are almost identical but now Crystal’s purse has found its way home and it’s none the worse for ware and the party will always be a memory of a Holiday Season highlight for me. To reach Rick Schultze email: yarick@pioneer.net