The Coat

There's a mystery jacket in the front closet, clearly left by a visitor. It is not ours. 

It does not belong to that nice boy.

It does not belong to our bandmates.

It does not belong to the precious nephew, but while I was showing it to him I reached into the right hand pocket and found this well-loved commemorative beer koozie.

Mazel tov, Jeremy and Danielle!

We do not know Jeremy and Danielle.

Broadening the search, neither do any of my FB friends know Jeremy and Danielle.

And at first, my prodigious research skills did not help me locate the happy couple, either, which was frustrating because I knew I should be able to find them.

Archives of The Knot do not go back to the year of Jeremy & Danielle's wedding (which I photoshopped out of the image).

I looked in newspapers.com and ancestry and familysearch, just because I wanted to see if I could identify them.

Then it occurred to me that while a beer koozie might list the groom's name first, the name on a wedding site is more likely to start with the bride's name. Duh. When I tried that search with the date of the wedding there was precisely one hit, for a photo booth session, that must have been "our" Jeremy and Danielle.

Such an adorable couple!

I still do not know them. Nor, giving a look at the hundreds of photos of their friends and family wearing festive crowns and hats and mustaches and making silly faces for the camera, do I recognize any of the guests. None of the guests was wearing the coat, which was much too casual for the occasion.

I now know the email address of the photo booth vendor, which takes me one step closer to Jeremy & Danielle. But really -- what am I going to do? I'm not going to ask the guy if he's still in touch with Jeremy & Danielle who had a wedding many years ago who might know a guy whose coat is in my closet. For all I know Coat Guy got the koozie in a white elephant exchange and is completely unrelated to the happy couple.

As a last resort I sent an email to our old contractor to see if it's his. We are such hermits. Other than the electrician and the plumber and the contractor, who has been to our house and could have left it here? UPDATE: not his.

In the meantime, I kinda like the coat for those cool foggy nights on the lanai. 

Maybe I'll keep it.