Kelric surprised us one evening by asking to go on a walk after dinner. He's three, but once in a while still enjoys a ride in the stroller. This was one of those evenings, and since I'm always interested in increasing my exercise level in pleasant ways and since I get to walk a lot less since my son was born, I was all for the after-dinner walk.
We ended our walk at the neighborhood playground. We arrived just in time for Kelric to play with T., a little boy about the same age who lives in our neighborhood and whose parents with whom we've always enjoyed talking. The big boys and little boys focused on playing with T.'s basketball, and we moms chatted off to the side.
When we finally parted ways and went home, our next door neighbors were sitting outside on their front porch. Before we could attempt to enter our home they informed us that the power was out. Nobody knew why, but there was no electricity on our side of the street. Houses across the street had power, but our side was out and so was part of another street we could see.
The power outage was a big problem for our family because we had brought only our garage door opener with us for household access. With the power turned off, we could not open our own garage door.
We could have called my mom and asked her to come over and bring a house key, but we had recently installed bolts high up on each exterior door. All of the bolts were engaged, so an unlocked door wouldn't help with both front door and back door bolts in place. We were stuck!
We couldn't drive anywhere because we didn't have any keys for the vehicles with us. We didn't even have a cell phone with us.
We were still puzzling about how to spend our evening when the other family walked up from the playground/park and started to walk home. I told them about our situation and they invited us to their house to hang out while we waited.
That was exciting, as these were people we wanted to get to know better but didn't want to seem too pushy about becoming better friends. They live on the street behind us, and as we approached their home we saw that the power was out on their street, too, but only to their house. The house on the left of their house had power. The house on the right did not. So weird! And funny, in a strange way.
The mom made tea, and the little boys played together as we all clustered on the front porch enjoying tea and time together. After a little while the power came back on, and we visited for a bit more before heading home to a late bedtime for Kelric.
I loved how an inconvenience like a power outage led to a pleasant evening sharing interesting conversation with nice people while our children played.
That was Lockout #1 for 2009.
Lockout #2 came when I misplaced my desk key at work.
It was the end of the work day. I was ready to go home and I had my purse locked in the overhead bin of my cubicle. I searched and searched for the little key that should have been in my pocket, but I could not find it anywhere. It wasn't in my jacket pocket. It wasn't on the floor. Most people had already gone home for the day.
I went to my boss who, fortunately, was working late.
"I'm ready to go home but my purse is locked in my desk," I explained. "My car keys are in my purse." He looked at me. "I can't go home."
My boss paused a beat and then smiled. "Sweet!" he said. "You have to stay at work forever!"
He was teasing and I was able to laugh at myself. Then he set about finding the key to the closet that held the keybox with spare keys to all the desks and filing cabinets. By the time he located the right key and walked to my cube, a co-worker had already popped the lock with a crowbar. Airtight security, those desks... No wonder my boss instructed me to take my company laptop home each night rather than leaving it in the office!
So I got my keys, thanked both men, and went home.
Sometime later when I laundered those pants, the key appeared in the laundry basket. How it had remained hidden while I dug through my pants pockets for a dozen times that day, I don't know.
Lockout #3 happened a short time later to my husband. His truck keys fell out of his pocket or off of his beltloop while at the grocery store. He called me at work for a ride home. He had already purchased the groceries before the noticed that his keys were gone, so he had cold stuff in the bag and needed to get home.
That incident wasn't quite so funny, but it wasn't too traumatic. I had the second set of truck keys in my purse so I left work early, met him at the grocery store, and gave him my set of keys. He left word with the service desk just in case anybody found the keys and turned them in. Amazingly enough, somebody did! We got a message the next day that the keys had been found. Guy picked up the original set of keys and things went back to normal.
I returned the lost-and-found kindness later in the year when I found a woman's ring in the grocery store's parking lot. It looked well worn which I took to mean it was much loved. I took the extra time to turn in the ring at the service desk. I have no idea what happened to the ring after I did that, but it felt good to give the ring's owner a chance at getting it back again.
And I found a purse left behind at a fast food restaurant in 2009. I gave it to the staff in case the owner came back for it.
I think back to how wonderful it felt to have our truck keys returned. With all the rotten things you read about in the papers and online articles, it's nice to know that kindness still exists and gets practiced in our society.
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