The worst place to lose your keys

On car rides as a kid, I had a strange habit of hanging my most valued possession outside the window of the car and seeing just how lightly I could hold the thing without dropping it. Sometimes this object was my Gameboy but 90% of the time it was my glasses (hey, I was blind without them okay?), which I would loosely hold out the window with two fingers. It was a very odd urge I had, to want to feel the anxiety of literally balancing the fate of something important in my hands.

My dad paid attention to me a lot when I was a kid and was always very concerned about my weird impulses. Like all fathers, he wanted his little boy to be happy-go-lucky, not tormented by the provocations of existentialism at the tender age of 9. On one of our family road trips, my sister as usual was asleep on one side of the backseat while my mom was asleep in her passenger seat. My dad was driving, and from his rear view mirror he watched me intently as I performed my stupid experiment. He fished a cigarette from out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth and said, “Idiot. Think. What you trying to do? If drop, you lose glasses forever. It never come back. Roll up window now, or I stop the car and punch you in the nose.”

I put my glasses back on so I could get a better look at my dad, and saw that his cigarette, with his teeth biting against the filter, was still unlit. And as red-hot angry as his eyes and face appeared, he probably didn’t even need a lighter to smoke that thing. As you could guess, I never did that shit around my dad ever again.

It’s too bad I never quite grew up.

For the sake of not looking like I need to see a shrink, I’ll avoid mentioning all the times I’ve closed my eyes while driving my car to see how much distance could be covered without hitting anything. Instead, I’ll tell you all a pretty amusing story about how I almost lost my keys forever last night.

I was walking to the best place to study on campus, Grainger Engineering Library, and out of boredom I kept twirling my key chain around my index finger. But soon even this got pretty boring, so I decided to start tossing my keys high in the air, and then running towards them to catch them again. It was the equivalent of how children like to step on only certain tiles on the ground at the grocery store, so that shopping with their moms can become bearable.

As I neared Springfield Avenue, I noticed a couple of sewer drains scattered along the curb of the street and made a mental note not to throw my keys in that direction, BECAUSE THAT WOULD SUCK IF MY KEYS LANDED INSIDE THE SEWER DRAIN. But as you could expect, the urges hit. The same self-destructive urges I get everytime I wash the dishes and can’t finish them because I feel like smashing plates on the ground and dancing to the latest Pussycat Dolls song.

I thought about how worried my dad looked that day in the car when he saw me acting so weird. How he said he would punch me in the nose if I ever pulled that shit again. And then I smiled wryly and said, “But Daddy ain’t here, is he?”

So here is the game I played. I lofted my keys high in the air, towards the direction of one of the sewer drains, and what I was supposed to do was catch the keys before they landed perilously into the drain, thereby saving myself from trouble.

You obviously know where this story is going.

I watched in unadulterated horror as I ran towards my keys falling from the sky, as they slipped between my outstretched hands into the cracks of the sewer drain cover. Random passersby must have thought I was trying to do a rain dance, because all I did for the next five minutes was circle the drain over and over, cursing at myself unintelligibly, waving my arms in the air in frustration, quickly kneeling close to the ground every few seconds to see if I could spot my keys in the sewer drain abyss.

So. What do you do when you drop your keys into a sewer drain? You 1) pray that they haven’t washed away forever into the underground pipes and the water system, and 2) you open up the sewer drain cover.

Yes, “open up the sewer drain cover.” I never knew it could be done before. I always assumed that they were kind of just sealed tightly shut and forgotten, and could not be removed. When I was a kid I knew that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were implausible because to me, manhole and sewer drain covers just could not be opened for them to go in and out.

It’s funny how silly our assumptions can be. I figured I had no other choice but to try, so I bent down on the ground while cars were whizzing past me, and pulled on the sewer drain cover. And it came out, slowly. It was heavy — probably about 40 or 50 pounds — but after a minute or two of hard grunting I slid the cover out of the way. I then peered inside the drain, using only my cellphone as light, and what do you know — there's a happy ending to this story — I FOUND MY KEYS.

If only to quell my future urges, I think I may play this game again. Sometime soon.