You can’t call this anything else than bad luck.
I got home from work and somehow slammed the key in the door bending it up. I tried to straighten it but it snapped off. Our one key to the Volvo. The key, that little piece of metal, is almost twenty years old so I didn’t blame the poor thing for breaking. It had lived a long life
I blamed rotten luck.
It took perfectly terrible timing.
And the stroke of brilliantly wretched fortune that the door struck the one key out of five that doesn’t have a replacement.
Not only that but I was parked behind my wife’s car, thus blocking it and leaving her without a ride to work tomorrow. Like I said, what rotten fucking luck.
I deserved it, I was feeling pissy inside for having to work the next two weeks without a day off. I was a one man boo-hoo, pity parade. It took me standing there holding a broken key to realize that all in all things could be worse. So what. Tomorrow I’ll take the bus and my wife will try to find a carpool. We will go on. We’ll get another key this weekend.
Surprisingly, I actually felt better having damaged the key. I felt that I learned an imortant lesson. The incident snapped me out of my petty shit.
The universe has a way of bitchslapping you every now and then when you really need it. It’s sometimes about as poetic as an elementary school bully.
Anyway, my wife affixed the key back together with Krazy glue and I threw a load of laundry in while waiting for the glue to dry and got some burritoes for us from down the street. I resigned myself to having to take the bus tomorrow. I was a good sport about it and when it was time to take the clothes out of the dryer we went down to the garage with minimal optimism andtried the key with a gloomy shrug.
“Here goes,” I told her and timidly slid the key into the hole.
It didn’t enter smoothly and it took some jiggling but then it clitcked and the engine quickly roared to life triumphantly and the sound of that 20th century Swedish vibration echoing through the subterranean parking garage lifted my soul.
I had accepted my destiny; the RTD, waking up an hour earlier, waiting for the bus then waiting for the subway, then a long walk to work, but a miracle had granted me a reprieve. The miracle of krazy glue.
You could say the universe slid me one back for a change.
I’ll take these small victories, and while doing so, recognize how truly spoiled silly I am.
