I was standing on the front porch Tuesday morning, flipping through my key ring in search of a key with a smear of pink fingernail polish.
It’s the key to the front door and should have been right there, next to my pickup key, but no. It wasn’t.
I have one of the old-fashioned key rings that is an inch-wide circle of two pieces of stiff metal. You hook a thumbnail between the pieces to open it, then work the keys in or out.
There are 17 keys on it (and I know this because I just counted). A couple of years ago, Kindra had the cool suggestion to put fingernail polish on the house key to make it stand out from the other keys and show up better on dark nights.
It has been a handy thing and makes it easy to find the key.
But I flipped through the ring twice, three times, then four, but the dang house key wasn’t on there. No pink polish in sight.
It was then that I remembered I had dropped off the mini-van Monday evening for some routine maintenance and had taken the key off the ring for the mechanic.
Perhaps the house key had worked its way off behind the mini-van key and fallen off.
So I drove by the garage, but the key was nowhere to be found.
I fumed about the lost key for much of the day, right up until 5:30 or so, when I was going to look the door to the newspaper office.
That’s when I discovered that the office key was missing, too. How could that be? I had no explanation, but the key wasn’t there.
I called Baylee Blancarte to lock the front door and then headed home, where Kindra would give me a ride to pick up the van.
On the way, I told her about the front door key and the key to the office and expressed my frustration that not one, but two, keys apparently had falled off the ring and then vanished into the air like a campaign promise.
She agreed it was a bizarre circumstance. At the garage, I looked around some more just in the case the keys had bounced a long way.
Nope. Nothing on the ground, so I pulled out the key ring to open the mini-van and felt something hit the top of my boot and then tink onto the concrete.
What’s this? Why, it was my office key, that’s what it was.
I dug to the bottom of my pocket, below the knife and the 57 cents in change and a guitar pick and there was the house key, too.
Hallelujah! This made my day, my week and my month. Maybe even the fourth quarter.
Upon further review and reflection, it seems that I had unintentionally worked those two keys off the ring behind the mini-van key but they had kept their grip until the ring was back in the pocket.
So, while I was standing on the porch looking for a smear of a pink polish and while I was flipping through the ring outside the newspaper office, the keys were right there on my person the entire time.
I probably should be embarrassed by this, but frankly, I am just glad I found the keys.
And next time, I’ll remember to check my pockets first.