It’s a normal thing to do. You have something in your hand. You need to do something else with your hand, so you just shove whatever it is in the pocket of your coat.

Then you go home, you take off your coat and put it in the closet.

Then the weather heats up and you never remove your coat from the closet until the following year.

You become acclimated to the warmer, sometimes blistering, but in the fall, generally balmy climate of the temperate zone in which you live.

Then the temperature drops dramatically and the coat comes out of its seasonal hibernation. Rather than taking its woolly, furry, warmy goodness into a cave for the winter, it comes out of its cave to wrap around you and keep you cozy.

And your hands, unaccustomed to the chill wind of January, seek refuge in those deep pockets.

You encounter a mini time capsule within each pocket. What were you doing a year ago?

Apparently you ate a caramel, for there is a wrapper, balled up and stuck that way in that deepest corner of the pocket. You also had a sore throat, given that there are a few empty lozenge wrappers and one still in the wrapper… though the wrapper is partially unwrapped and the lozenge is more than a little fuzzy with lint.

The paperclip straightened into what is now more or less a long metal pin suggests you may have needed to open a jammed cd drive… or pick a simple lock…

Inexplicably, however, you find you have a business card in your pocket. It is a business card you do not recall receiving or picking up.

This business card is bright yellow, with a simple graphic advertising a local cab company. It tells you that you can pay with a variety of credit cards by the tiny card icons up at the top right corner. The cab company’s slogan tells you how very long they have been in operation… only a decade away from a century. It bears two phone numbers… to be doubly sure you’ll call them first?

But on the back… here you find a name. Just a first name. Jim. It’s scrawled in careless cursive with a string of digits below it, two of which are hard to decipher. 595 … or is that 696? 9837?

You think that’s what it says. Maybe not. Pretty messy.

Jim.

Do you know a Jim?

And why do you have Jim’s number?

This is especially perplexing, given that you have not been in a cab in close to 20 years, nor have you had occasion to call one for anyone else. (Though it has crossed your mind a time or two.)

Is Jim a past, fleeting, love interest? Or were you one such for him, at least, that he hastily scrawled a hint of your allure which you absently slipped into a pocket without a second glance. Are you so callous and uncaring? Was he that uninteresting?

Is Jim a cab driver? Or did Jim just take a cab one fateful day, retrieving a business card to remind him of the cab company’s number in the future, should he ever need it… then lightning struck and he was faced with a hurried need to convey, in 3 short letters and 7 numbers, his momentary hope that he could do more than say hello to you.

And now you have this bright yellow card. With a name and a number. And you really don’t know who Jim was. You don’t know what Jim looks like. You don’t know what Jim does for a living, or even if Jim thought you were pretty. Maybe Jim was looking for someone to babysit his kids. Maybe Jim was a mechanic, and in some brief, “time of day” sort of exchange, you mentioned you needed someone to have a look at that odd sound you could hear under the hood of your car every so often…

Who is Jim?

And why is your memory so short that you can’t remember the events a year ago that caused you to cross Jim’s path?

WHO IS JIM?!

Alas… poor Jim… I knew him, Horatio. But I promptly forgot him.