Act of Cubbie Kindness?

My evening train ride home is always capped off with a hunt through the vast train station parking lot in search of my car. I usually have approximate knowledge of where I had parked that morning, so I will start out headed in the general direction of where I expected to find my car. The parking lot is too large to remember an exact location. I just point myself towards a vague point in the parking lot horizon and start walking. Eventually I spot my car. The process hasn’t led me astray yet. There aren’t any other ’96 dark green Plymouth Neons at the Route 59 parking lot.

However, this past Tuesday evening I thought I had stumbled upon a second Neon which was parking in my general parking area.

From a couple rows back I had spotted my green Neon while walking through the parking lot. But as I got closer to the vehicle I noticed that there was a tiny Chicago Cubs flag attached to the Neon’s antennae. The Neon doesn’t have a Cubs flag on it. It must be a different green Neon with paint slowly wearing off the rear bumper and a WXRT sticker in the read window, was my immediate thought.

I walked up to the car and looked inside.

Yep, that was the Neon that I had drive to the station that morning. And I was 99% sure there wasn’t a little flag on the antennae when I left the house that morning. Where did the Cubs flag come from?

I looked around to see if other vehicles had similar flags. Maybe it was part of a guerilla marketing tactic, like when the Korean Church stuffs copies of their newspaper under everyone’s wiper blades. But I don’t see another Cubs flag anywhere. My Neon is the only car sporting a tiny little blue flag.

I gave up thinking about it for the moment, got in the car, and went home. That night at dinner I asked Heather if she had snuck the flag onto the car as a surprise. She swore up and down that she did not. The kids certainly didn’t do.

It’s a solid little flag. Real sturdy. Based on some searching I did on the web today at lunch, it looks like the flag goes for $6. So where did it come from?

Did somebody just feel like giving the flag away as a gift and my Neon’s antennae was the closest one nearby? Is it actually a covert tracking device, silently sending back the Neon’s location via GPS relay? Have I been tagged by other drivers from the Route 59 train station because of my driving practices – they want to see where I am so they can get out of my way / block me from leaving? It’s an interesting mystery.