My wife Barbara worked late Friday night. When she came in, she whispered in my ear. "I've got bad news."

She'd spent most of the week working on a front-page feature for the Sunday paper, so I figured she hadn't gotten fired. Maybe it was something along the lines of "I've got to work tomorrow to finish my story, and I won't be able to go to the beer festival with you." Which, come to think of it, would have been worse news than her getting fired.

Instead, she told me that someone stole the license plate on my car. "I'm sorry," she said. "Maybe if I hadn't been so late my car would have been in front of yours and yours wouldn't have been stolen." Her concern and mine, once I realized what she was saying, is that I have a vanity plate. AIDABET. It's an abbreviation of my website, Aiding & Abetting. If the plate was gone, then it was unlikely that I'd be able to get a direct replacement. I'd have to think of something else. A&A, maybe-if the state stamp set includes an ampersand.

I told her that I would report the theft on Saturday morning. After all, it was almost 10 on a Friday night. And we're talking about a license plate. Who really cares? I'd had a plate ripped off my car when I lived in Florida, and someone stole one off Barbara's Accord last November, about a month before someone else decided to go whole-hog and take the entire car. So we'd been through the stolen plate protocol before, and in any case I wouldn't be able to wander down to the DMV until Monday, and thus I didn't think it mattered much when I reported the theft.

"Just do it now," Barbara told me. "They'll just call you back and take a phone report. It'll take five minutes."

I couldn't really argue. I dialed 911--in Durham, you're supposed to dial 911 for everything from a dog barking for hours on end to the more traditional "emergencies" of murder and such. For some reason, the local police department uses the 911 logs to keep track of crime. Anyway, the dispatcher took down my information and said she'd pass it on. Good enough.

Five minutes later, a black-and-white pulled up in front of my house and an officer rang our doorbell. We walked out to my car and I pointed at the space where the plate once resided. He asked for my ID. I'd left that inside, but I did give him my registration, which I'd grabbed out of my car after calling 911. As I walked back to my house to get my driver's license, I heard him exclaim "son of a bitch!" into his radio. I figured he must have been talking about some other case.

But when I came back out and handed him my license, he told me that my plate had been spotted on a stolen VW bug (new version) last seen traveling down a street five blocks from my house. The car itself had been stolen about a mile away. The officer said that the owner had chased the car a good ways (on foot or otherwise; I just don't know) before losing sight of it. But the fact that the thief knew his fresh ride had been reported meant that it was pretty likely the car would be recovered that night.

After a few conversations on his radio, the officer gave me a piece of paper with his name and a number for the report on my stolen plate. "If we get the car tonight, I'll bring you back the plate and throw away the report. That way you won't have to deal with DMV." If not, well, I'd have to get a new plate.

He then asked if I'd touched my car around where the plate had been. "Would it be alright if we dusted your car for any prints?" I explained where I had touched the car and gave my permission. Then he thanked me for my information and I thanked him for coming out.

About an hour later, the technician came out and dusted my car. Then everything was quiet. And I went to sleep.

At four-thirty Saturday morning, I heard the unmistakable sound of someone walking on our front porch. The porch sits over our basement, and any noise is amplified through the basement (and the house). Then the doorbell rang.

Barbara looked over at me. "You want me to come out with you?" I said no. I found my jeans quickly and proceeded to put them on inside-out. I yanked them off, threw on a shirt and struggled to pull up my jeans again as I walked toward the door. The doorbell rang again, waking up our son Max. He cried as I went to the door. I checked the peephole. It was the officer. I opened up. He gave me the plate. I asked if they got him. He said yes. I thanked him for bringing back the plate and said goodbye. I closed the door, put the plate on the coffee table, told Max to go to sleep (he actually did) and then went to sleep myself.

Saturday morning, I spent more time that you'd expect trying to locate the correct size bolts for re-attatching my plate. But after about 15 tries (which involved plucking bolts out of a bin, wandering out to my car, trying them out and taking them back), I found a perfect fit. For those curious, 1992 Civics take a size six (that's six millimeter) machine screw. I cleaned the fingerprint dust off my plate (maybe they didn't catch the thief, after all) and all was well once again.

Saturday evening, while sampling a good many fine beers, I thought about the exciting time my plate experienced the night before. It's pretty unlikely that I'll ever have the thrill of flying through city streets, joyriding in a stolen car and trying to avoid the cops. But I can live vicariously through my license plate, which seems to me to be much healthier than doing the same thing with your kids.

Jon Worley wore his Bell's brewery shirt to the beer tasting, which made him one of the more popular people under the tent.