average life

As soon as my car door closed, I knew my keys were locked inside.  I jammed my hands into my pockets.  I was hoping that I had my keys and I just couldn’t feel them.  All I found was my cell phone and my wallet.  I looked at my apartment building.  They key to my apartment was on my key ring, locked in the car.  My roommate would be out of town for another three days.  How did I always manage to lock myself out when he is out of town, I thought.  After I did this the last time, we made extra apartment keys…and then left them in the apartment.  So I was locked out of my car and out of my apartment.

Crap.

I pulled out my cell phone and called my boss.  He had an extra key to my car and I hoped that he was answering his phone.  He was and he let me know he was on his way to his home in Decatur to fetch the  key.  With the holiday traffic, I knew that it would be almost an hour before he would be able to make it to my apartment.  I pulled on the new sweatshirt emblazoned with a local design company’s logo.  I felt glad, I had grabbed it when I got out of my car.  I just wished I had grabbed my keys instead.  I tried to think of what I would do had I didn’t have my boss as a backup plan.  I could have called a locksmith, I thought.  I looked at my phone.  The battery was almost dead.

I sat on the front porch of the building to stay out of the wind.  I thought about the time on my mission that my companion and I became stranded two cities over after midnight.  We had gotten on the bus to go to the train station, but we had gotten on the bus on the wrong side of the road.  We ended up at the wrong end of the line after the last train would have left the station.  We decided that it would best to walk back to the missionaries house whose city it was and stay the night with them.  We walked a mile or so and reached the Elder’s apartment, which was a carriage house behind the home of a member.  At first we tried yelling “quietly”.  It was our goal to wake the missionaries and not the people in the front house.  After about twenty minutes, that plan was tossed out the window and we simply wanted to be indoors.  We yelled and clapped and tried to wake anyone who would hear us.  I was surprised when this method didn’t have the immediate results we were expecting.  All the lights in the house and the carriage house behind remained dark.

I looked across the street at the park.  I wondered how hard I would be to sleep on the unusually manicured grass.  It was humid and there were halos around the street lights.  I didn’t even care that it would probably look pretty bad to the morning commuters to see two Mormon missionaries in full ties and tags waking up in the local park, I just wanted to sleep.

Someone in the front house stirred and after a little convincing that we were, in fact, missionaries (somehow our clothes weren’t convincing enough), he let us in and after over an hour of standing on the sidewalk, we each slept on a thin blanket on the missionaries’ hard tile floor.  As I tried to sleep, I thought about the soft-looking green grass in the park across the street.

I caught myself starting to nod off on the front porch.  I didn’t want to miss my boss, so I got up to walk around.  A man walked two dogs down the sidewalk.  A couple of cyclists rode by.  It was winter in Atlanta, but was summer in Brazil.  The grass there would be a very bright green.