Lost and Found Idiocy

Yesterday evening my boyfriend, Dan, and I went out for a pizza. Dan was to pick me up at 7 PM and since I was hungry, I was waiting for him in the apartment’s parking lot. When I get hungry, I become anxious for food.

We returned back to my apartment about an hour later. As we were walking towards my apartment, I began searching for my keys. They were nowhere to be found. The hunt was brief since I was not carrying anything in my hands and I had a total of two usable pockets in my jeans. I stopped to give the predicament some thought. I could distinctly recalled locking the front door, but not much more. Anyway, I went into a panic.

We rushed back to the pizzeria and asked if anyone had turned in a set of keys. The answer was no. We quickly hurried to the booth where we had been seated. The booth was occupied and so after an apology to the people, we searched around the seats and the area floor. I discarded some dignity and got down on all fours to explore under the table. I came up empty. No keys.

There were then two possibilities remaining; one was that the keys had been found by someone and were likely gone forever; the other possibility was that they were in Dan’s car somewhere, perhaps under the passenger seat.

We turned the interior of Dan’s car practically inside-out. In and around the seats we found assorted pocket change, a pair of long-lost sunglasses, a candy wrapper, and a pen, but no keys. I was beginning to accept the notion that they were gone forever.

The good news was that I had a spare for all the keys except for my workplace, and my mailbox. So although I was annoyed and frustrated by the lost keys, I knew that the pending inconvenience could be a lot worse.

I had given an extra apartment key to my parents for safe keeping, so Dan and I headed over to their house. My father had met Dan at a 4^th of July ceremony in the country, but my mother had not yet met him. Unfortunately, the meeting was very brief and not under the best of circumstances. It was nothing much more than a quick hello and a goodbye. My mother is known to go into a tizzy from time to time, so I think she understood the situation.   

As we were returning to my apartment, I began feeling more relaxed, less unnerved. I told Dan that I appreciated his patience with my less than wonderful demeanor through the ordeal, and that a glass or two of red wine would do us both some good. We climbed up the three steps to my front door stoop. I readied the key, pulled open the storm door and there before my eyes was my set of keys; dangling from the door lock. I had latched the door but in an astounding display of numbskullery, had neglected to remove the keys from the lock.

My only explanation is that I was so hungry for pizza that my thinking momentarily went awry. I decided to drown the thought of the idiocy with not two, but three glasses of red wine. The idiocy succumbed to approximately 2.5 glasses whereupon I fell asleep on the sofa. I wonder if I dreamt of keys. If so, it most assuredly would have been a nightmare.