My Haunted Ride
Well I found the bag with my lost items and a good thing too, since the spare car key old Dave loaned to me was bewitched.It has that touch pad on it, you know the one, that you use to make the back hatch pop up or the sliding doors open.(This my car by the way, a 2005 Town and Country.)Well none of those functions work with Old Dave's key. His key to my car behaves so badly he has to bury it in the back yard so it will cease communicating with the vehicle. (OK, not really. Really it’s in his the bottom of his sock drawer, which is practically the same thing.)With his key, when you’re done driving it, you turn off the engine, press ‘Lock’ on the little keypad that’s right on the key and walk away, secure in the knowledge that your vehicle is protected. Not with Dave’s key. With Dave’s key you lock up and within 20 seconds people are yelling that one of your sliding doors is.“Hey, you left your DOOR open!” they call as if you’re the stupidest person in the world, but that’s only if you’re lucky.If you’re not lucky, as I learned yesterday, you come back from 45 minutes in the grocery store and only THEN find that the car door is open and a family of raccoons has moved in and begun preparing dinner.So the first thing I did yesterday was go the dealership to see about making a new key to replace my old key.“That’ll cost ya $225,” the woman in Service told me.“I can’t pay that! I said and went on to explain the problem with Dave’s key. “Can’t you just do something to make it stop talking to my doors this way?”“Gosh, I don’t know. Let’s move you over to Parts.”So over I went to Parts, where I explained my problem to the equally nice person manning that desk.He listened as I gestured to my car, visible through the plate-glass window, just 50 feet away.He tested its battery which was fine, and laid it on the counter to consider the problem.Then “Hey! I didn’t even touch the key and look!” he cried, gesturing outside. “Your left rear door slid open!”“What I’m sayin’!”So he has ordered a new key with no smart functions at all that will cost me less than 50 bucks.Of course Old Dave is trying to call this a waste of money. “The key is fine,” he said if you can call a key fine that has to be buried at all times to make it stop poltergeisting all over the place.Anyway I go back to the dealership today and pick up my new, UN-smart key – which I’m thinking I will keep ON MY PERSON at all times - maybe inside my bra even, which is where I keep my Bluetooth – so that I never again find myself locked out as I was on Wednesday.Still, all’s well that ends well and I am happier than I can say that my missing bag was found.I went back to the mall in person again yesterday and walked from office to office asking after that lost RadioShack bag. “Sorry” they said at Macy’s Lost and Found. “No, Sorry” at the Mall Office. “Sorry!” at the Customer Service counter at the mouth of the Lord and Taylor walkway.Then, I went back to EBar, the fancy-coffee place just outside Nordstrom’s. I had bought a coffee there Wednesday and that’s the first place I went in retracing my steps that day, but they hadn’t seen my bag either.This time though on my second day of scouring I approached the barista.“Nobody turned in a RadioShack bag to you, did they?”“The other day?” she said.“Yes,” I said with a quickening heartbeat. ‘She walked ten feet down the counter and bent over to reach into a shelf.“Here ya go!” she said. “Somebody brought it in at the end of the day.”So it wasn’t stolen at all but only lost.I love it when things are only lost because I believe all lost things come back to us in the end. When I was two I lost my favorite ball toy and mentioned it aloud it in my prayers every night along, with the little stray cat we called Stranger who was with us for only about a week. God please find… “ I prayed.Those two things aren’t back yet but hey: I’m still in the early innings here, right?
the lost bag and keys, found at last
the lost bag and keys, found at last
