03
Everything but a key on my key ring
I got a wakeup call Tuesday when my next-door neighbor and friend came home with hungry kids and $200 worth of groceries in her car and an anxious pooch inside to find that she was locked out.
Her garage door opener, which (like most of us) she keeps inside her car, had stopped working for some reason. The keypad next to the door also failed to work.
The theory from a couple of guys in the neighborhood was that the garage fuse had blown.
The trouble was, all the doors and windows to her house were locked. And deadbolted. And she had no key.
We tried climbing our ladder to an upstairs window on the chance that it had been cracked, but no.
Her husband, who was at work, said he had a key. In the house.
Her children had lost their key.
So she was stuck. Eventually she caved and spent $90 to hire a locksmith to get them inside.
It was a stark reminder that we all should leave a house key with a trusted neighbor or two, to prevent such an event from occurring again. And, since our houses were built about the same time — 1997ish — her blown fuse or dead battery issue could soon happen to me.
I was thinking about that this morning and resolving to copy my key for her. Only it occurred to me that I wasn’t sure where it was.
You see, like my neighbor, I have always relied on our garage door opener. And, failing that, the keypad.
I glanced at my key ring — for all the things dangling from it, you’d think I’d be all set.
Mostly what it has are grocery-store membership cards entitling me to discounts. That ring is a virtual memory album for every place I frequent, from weekly stops at Buehler’s and Giant Eagle, to a handful of vacations in the Outer Banks, where we shopped at Food Lion. I keep that one with the wistful hope that we’ll need it again. . . and soon.
I have all of two keys on that dang key ring. One is for my car. The other, I later found through trial and error, is for the deadbolt on my garage “service” door. Not the doorknob lock, mind you, so most likely I still would have been locked out, even if I could unlatch the bolt.
Somewhere in this house I have keys for my exterior doors. My job this week is to find them, label them, and copy one for a neighbor or two. Before we blow a fuse.