These
days I spend lots of time looking for my keys.
I like to think I misplace them because my mind is somewhere else, not
that it went missing entirely. But when
a set of keys went missing last week, we almost lost our minds.
We discovered them gone after a
simple evening bike ride to pick up mail from the Exeter post office. Must have left them on the counter, we
thought, and went back to get them. Not
there. Must have dropped them somewhere,
maybe into the waste basket with the sale flyers that had jammed the P.O. box. After digging through mounds of paper, not
there.
Maybe they fell out of a pocket and
are lying somewhere on the street. Two
trips both directions produced no keys.
After exhausting all the possibilities, the obvious one arrived: we left
them in the door of the P.O. box and someone took them.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I
think at that point a person has two choices.
You can assume that means you’ll never see those keys again and start
planning on replacing them. Or you can
imagine what you would do if
you walked into the post office one evening and found some keys hanging from an
open P.O. box.
I figured that if I had presence of
mind (and some days that’s a big “if,”) I’d drop them in the post office letter
slot where they’d be safe. Hopefully the
keys’ owners would figure out where they left them sooner or later and come
back asking if they’d been found.
Mentally, that’s the route I chose
that night. The next morning it proved
to have been correct. The postal clerk
checked the letter slot, and there they were, wrapped in an emptied envelope
secured by a turquoise hair band with a note describing the location where the
keys were found. No name, no credit to
take or be given, just the essential kindness of looking out for a fellow human
being.
The clerk and I looked at each other
with something between amazement and relief.
“Ninety percent of the time, this is what would happen,” I said, verbalizing
my vindicated belief. But I think we
were appreciating that fact together silently.
It was one of those ordinary sacred moments, finding the holy in a
rescued set of keys.
And I think these moments are the
keys to how we get through the uncertainties we’re living through right now,
what the writer Thomas Friedman has been calling the turbulence of accelerating
change. “We have to stay in the eye of
the storm,” he advised at a recent presentation in Fresno, “where it’s calm.” I was helped when I heard him say that, but I
wondered how - until someone performed an essential kindness for a stranger.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a writer in Lindsay. Many
thanks to whoever rescued our keys, and also to Rev. John Gutierrez for
offering his ladder Sunday. Both made
the world a calmer place.
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