… has been found. The 50-plus pounds of luggage in a big ol’ canvas bag that did not arrive in Abu Dhabi along with us and our other bag, turned up two days late and ended up safely in our apartment. With all of its original contents.

If only bags could talk! What a story that battered old thing could tell.

We had checked two bags at LAX. We were pushing the American Airlines weight limit with both. They had to be 50 pounds or less, each, to avoid a $100 penalty.

I had tried to weigh the two of them on a standing scale at the house, and that was not exactly a precision exercise, me holding the bags lengthwise and trying to determine how close to 50 we were.

I knew we were close on both.

At LAX, it turned out we had 56 pounds in one bag, and about 47 in the other.

The agent, instead of doing the arithmetic and saying, “No way you can get both to 50, is there?” instead suggested that we pull X number of things out of the one bag to place in the other. She suggested shoes and jeans as suitably heavy single items. So, Leah snatched one of my new Stan Smith Adidas tennis shoes, a heavy notebook, my sweatshirt out of one bag, and I jammed them into the other, and suddenly the heavy bag was down to 53, and the agent said, “That’s close enough.”

I have a sense, however, that those frantic moments there (the agent also said something about, “You have five minutes to get these bags to the TSA,” when, in fact, she seemed to be thinking about another American flight leaving for Chicago) created some confusion.

I am almost sure she tagged both bags (we certainly had two tag stubs on our  ticket folder), but I wouldn’t swear to it in court. Again, I doubt the TSA guys at The Big X-Ray Machine in the corner of the terminal would take a bag without a tag, but …

So, even though the two bags were handed over together to the uniformed guy, maybe one didn’t make that LAX flight. Or perhaps one didn’t make the transfer from the American flight to the Etihad flight at ORD in Chicago. (I think the latter is more likely.)

The hour we spent at the “lost luggage” counter, after we realized we had arrived without the one bag, had one rocky moment when the guy working for Etihad suggested that the number we gave him for our lost bag had been assigned to a passenger named “Hicks.” Which didn’t seem possible, but if it were … the bag might never turn up.

The luggage guy gave Leah a long folder with all the pertinent information about the bag in it … and Leah promptly left it in the taxi that took us into town in Abu Dhabi. Not that she knew it right off. She began looking for it the next morning, so she could call the luggage counter, and realized she couldn’t find it, and I confused things by suggesting I had seen that folder inside the house … maybe … When I hadn’t.

After 24 hours, she called the government agency here that oversees operations of the seven or eight cab companies in the emirate, asking about a lost folder.

The cab companies here have an excellent reputation for turning in lost items, however insignificant they might seem, and after describing the folder to the Abu Dhabi Transit official, and telling him the approximate time of the cab ride, and the place where it started and finished, and the amount of the fare … and taking a stab at the name of the company the taxi driver was working for … the guy said he would look into it.

Leah called back an hour later and, lo, they had found the baggage info folder and gave her the cell number of the cabbie who had turned it in.

He drove the folder back over to the newspaper, and Leah paid for his ride, and now she had the folder again and could begin bugging the Etihad luggage guys. (Not that this really mattered, from what I can tell; the bag was going to come whether or not she had the folder of documents, but at the time it was a small thing that seemed as if it might be a big deal.)

That night, we got a message that our bag was coming in, two days late, on the Etihad flight from Chicago, and at about 8 p.m. a guy called and said he had the bag and would be delivering it before 11 p.m. And a few hours later a young guy from the subcontinent, driving a battered old passenger car with about three bags squished inside it … called, and after several attempts to explain where we live (no addresses in AD, remember?), I finally waved him down while he was parked, lost, in front of Khalifa University about 100 yards from the apartment … and a Dh10 tip later, the bag was in the house.

I wonder if the bag had a good time during those two days in (I’m guessing) Chicago. Now I have my new T-shirts, and my Duke Snider bobblehead, and he’s about to go on display on my desk at The National. And our luggage story has a happy ending.