My MP3 player was stolen from my locker at the rec center today.

I bought the player in late December, after getting a membership to the rec center. I’d owned another player several years earlier, but it no longer operated, and I thought it would be good to listen to my favorite music while I was working out. It has been good; there are TVs in the fitness room, but they’re usually turned to news channels and when I leave the newspaper in the afternoon the last thing I want is news.

I bought a padlock in early January, right after my rec center membership started. I was good about keeping my locker locked for a month or two, until one day I left the lock behind and never saw it again. I meant to replace it, but in the middle of winter there really weren’t that many people in the indoor pool locker room. Some days, I had the pool entirely to myself; when there were others about, they were usually part of the swim team or young children with their parents. So replacing the padlock didn’t seem like a big priority at the time.

But last week, school let out — and then the outdoor pool opened. Now, there are a lot more unsupervised teens wandering about. I was only in the pool 15 minutes or so; there was no one in the locker room when I went in, no one in the locker room when I came out. Someone must have seen me wearing the MP3 player when I came out of the fitness room and went into the pool locker room, known that I would be taking it off to go into the pool, and then gone in and looked for it.

Fortunately, I had no cash in my wallet, and so the only thing that seems to have been taken was the player.

I am frustrated, of course, and angry. A lot of people have had a lot worse things stolen from them, but any theft makes you realize just how vulnerable you are. The MP3 player can be replaced. I window-shopped at Wal-Mart this afternoon, and models with comparable capacity can be had for 1/2 to 2/3 what I paid six months ago. I won’t get to it until after payday, however.

The one thing I did buy today was a new padlock.