The activity today encompassed a trip to a strip mall to visit a ladies’ store that sold lady things, well not necessarily ladies stuff but stuff ladies normally buy. Think of the store like a giant female-style hardware. A place where men feel very uncomfortable, become quiet, bored and disinterested and are outnumbered by females twenty to one. The strip mall is over eighteen kilometres from home and involves a brief run on a motorway.
A huge shop full with kitchen wear, sewing stuff everything from yarn to sewing machines, obviously fabrics, crafty things, kitchen things, curtains and curtain paraphernalia, bedroom stuff, no not that kind of bedroom stuff more like sheets, blankets pillows and pillowcases.
The mission was to purchase something to do with mattresses. I took the big Nissan Patrol as transport. My better half was ignited in full shopping mode I needed to ensure I had space after all we were looking for something to do with mattresses and our bed is a king size it stands to reason this is going to be a huge purchase, as in physically big, doesn’t it. Well, I thought so.
“Give me the keys, you always manage to miss lay them.” My wife had no faith in me with keys, it has been a lifelong pattern, along with passports, driver’s licences and all manner of other essential things.
We spent what felt like hours looking at things called mattress protecters, we settled on something that apart from anything seemed to have three prices. One recommended retail, one marked at a percent off and another just marked price — we thought the cheapest of these numbers was obviously the correct marked price, that suited us. Apparently, it wasn’t, a small skirmish took place at checkout, which thankfully ended in our favour.
“Now I am going to give you the keys to the truck while I go to the loo, take our parcel and be sure to lock the car door if you’re going to leave the car.” See, I said she doesn’t trust me one bit.
Off she strode, while I took responsibility of transporting our mattresses thingy to the truck and securely locking it away safely.
Job done my body decided it was time to evacuate my bowels and wasn’t hanging around. I quickly found my way across the car park, disappeared down the hall beside a cafe leading to the facilities. I was in luck nobody was in the gents, unlike the ladies, which had a queue. I won’t explain the toilet activity, what happens in the toilet stall hopefully stays in the stall.
Mission completed, I headed back to the Nissan, went to open the door, and — you guessed it — I had no keys. Not my fault my wife’s she knows not to trust me with keys everyone knows that. I looked in every pocket, I had cargo pants on, so I assumed I might have put them in the wrong pocket. Cargo pants have far too many pockets, making it easy to mislay things in this style of pants. Not there, I thought I might have dropped them when I locked up, I looked under our vehicle, I looked under the vehicle in front of us, I crawled under both of these vehicles nothing. I wonder what people thought of this mid-seventy old man crawling around the car park and disappearing under cars. I am surprised the police weren’t called.
The consequences were beginning to flood my mind, making searching for car keys less intense not more. If the keys have truly disappeared, then how do we get home? How do we retrieve the car and our expensive mattress thingy? Worst of all, I am going to hear of this incident repeatedly for the rest of my life. I need to find my keys before she knows.
I carefully retraced my steps across the car park very slowly. Nothing, my other half had not yet returned from the toilet, and so she didn’t know of my shameful act of losing my keys. I went up the passageway to the men’s, there was still a queue to the ladies, not a soul in the men’s. Thankfully, the single cubicle was vacant, I stepped in, nothing. Back to hands and knees I scoured the floor, nothing. It crossed my mind I might have flushed them down the toilet but dismissed it, they were too heavy, surely. It crossed my mind also that someone might walk in while I was on my hands and knees poking around the men’s toilet bowl.
Nothing for it, I am going to have search the street again, retracing my steps past the queue for the ladies heading down the passage to the street, I noticed the women’s toilet queue lessened. Bright sun made me squint as I exited onto the two-metre-wide concrete pavement.
“Head back to the mattress shop, then cross where I went on the way to the loo,” my mind working overtime to mitigate the humiliation. “If you could find the keys before the wife discovers I have mislaid them, I wouldn’t have to suffer the humiliation. Focus, old man, concentrate.”
“What are you up to?” A woman’s voice I recognise interrupts my concentration, bugger busted.
“I’ve mislaid the keys love.” No point in lying about it.
“You what, how the hell did you do that, how are we going to get home, you stupid man, where did you lose them?” So many questions and no answers.
“Have you checked your pockets?”
“Yes, of course I have.”
“Let me check them.” Before I knew it, I was being patted down like a schoolkid who has lost their lunch money. In some ways I hoped she would find them, on the other hand I didn’t want to feel like that idiot who had failed to check his own pockets correctly. Then relief.
“They are not here, now what?” My wife had reached the same conclusion as I had.
“You had better search the pavement, and we will go back and search around the car.”
“Yes, mam.” Did I mention I felt like a schoolboy again and not in a good way?
We searched around and under the vehicle, the road and footpath, I entered every shop and asked, rang centre management. Nice lady like the others but no help, offering to keep an eye, I gave so many elderly ladies my phone number I felt like an out of work male escort, but no keys.
“We do have a spare set at home you know.” My wife offered.
“How do we get home, and once we are there, how do we get in? The house keys are on the lost keyring. “I replied.
A brief silence, I suggested a cab. Surveying the situation, I found the nearest cab was 40 minutes away, however an Uber was less than five minutes. I had never ordered an Uber before and spent twenty minutes setting up the App. Bad news — it seems you need to pay in advance for an Uber, good news was it was somewhat cheaper than a cab. Uber ordered, we watched the little map track our ride to our seat, fascinating. We took off in what appeared to us the wrong direction only to find there was a quicker way home. We have only lived here 25 years and didn’t know.
At home we retrieved our spare key, dug out the keys to the house and before you know it were driving back to the shopping district, we had left our Nissan Patrol driving our second car with the Nissan keys firmly in my wife’s possession. First, a stop was to visit our liquor wholesalers to top up the bar before retrieving our truck.
The wander around the wholesalers was subdued, my mess up losing the truck keys was not going to be forgotten easily, then there was the two hundred and fifty or more to replace them.
We returned to the car, my better half got in while I loaded the purchases carefully in the car so nothing would break. I opened the passenger door; this car wasn’t built for a plus size guy like me. The seat needed adjusting to get in, then adjusting when seated. As I stretched my legs to carry out this activity, I felt very uncomfortable. No, not the kind of discomfort you feel when you need to evacuate your bowel or your bladder, a scratchier sort of uncomfortable like a foreign object had squeezed into your underwear. Difficult to investigate this kind of discomfort in a liquor wholesalers carpark, you could get arrested.
Shamefully fishing around in my underwear looking for whatever was causing my discomfort while my suspicious driver told me off for playing with my bits in public. It dawned on me that the source of my irritation was definitely a foreign object but difficult to identify what it was and why it was in my underwear. As I explored deeper, it occurred to me that it was indeed my lost set of car keys. I pondered whether I should admit this or just slide them back into the house without admission, but decided honesty was the best policy.
It became apparent I had absented mindedly, dropped them when rushing for relief, early in the day, instead of dropping to the floor they had managed to be get caught in the gusset of my underwear, how the heck I never noticed is beyond me. My wife thought it hilarious, and the day ended on a high note except for the thirty dollars I spent on Uber.
Why they hadn’t made themselves apparent early, who knows. The upshot of this misadventure has been, when I am looking for my car Keys, I am always asked if I have checked my underwear.