A Tale of Woe, Wind, and Whippets.

My mother is a substitute teacher, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I'm telling you this because, more often than not, she doesn't really know in advance when she's working. Sometimes she gets a call in the evening prior to working, sometimes a school will call even at 6:30 that morning to see if she's available. Last night when I was at work (6pm to 10pm), she apparently got a call from one of the local Catholic schools, to sub today. I'd planned to run some errands today, though, which I probably wouldn't have enough time to do if I had to wait until 3:30 to do them (as I have no vehicle of my own). So she woke me up a few minutes before she had to leave so I could chauffeur her to the high school.

Now, let me say in advance that I'm not a morning person. I may have mentioned it in the past, but I can't begin to stress enough how much of a morning person I'm not. I'm the type of person who, ideally, crawls out of bed at the earliest of 10am or so, stumbles into a 15-minute shower, emerges, dresses, drinks at least one large mug of strong coffee, and then thinks about waking up. So if you give me a few minutes to wake up, yes I can drive the car two miles back home down local roads, but anything more stressing than that is just a Bad Idea.

When I walked into the kitchen this morning, having donned a sweatshirt, knit cap, and my contact lenses, my mother inexplicably handed me a spare set of car keys. I pondered it for a moment and hung them up on the bulletin board with the other spares: it was eventually decided that my mother handed me those keys because (paraphrasing her, here, but fairly close to the original) she was losing her mind. This is relevant, because while I was there, I grabbed the spare keys to her car off the board, rather than grabbing mine off the table by the door, where I had left them last night after work. Following so far?

We cruise on up to the school and I deposit my mother amongst the throngs of green-sweater-clad teenagers (interlude: seriously, how much do you not miss high school? I still don't understand how they were the "best days of my life" or anything remotely close.) and depart. You can't make left turns at a number of stoplights in New Jersey (Why? Who knows!), so I zoom past the intersection, turn right onto a side street, and turn right onto the street I wanted to turn left on. I'm sitting at the light, and then a brick falls on my head (not literally, of course): I took the spare keys.

The spare car keys on the bulletin board are just that: spare car keys. They are an entirely seperate entity from, say, the spare house key that hangs on the next tack over.

The PG-13 rated version: Aw, CRAP!

I get home and pull into the drive. Hey, my parents forgot to let the dog back in, and she's really digging being alone outside in the gusty wind and slight rain! I check the garage in the vain hopes that there's a spare key outside the house, where you could get to it in the instances where you really need a spare key. No such luck. I call our neighbor down the street, who does not answer the phone, implying an absence from their house, meaning that they copy of the key that they have is probably locked away somewhere.

So, apologizing a thousand and twelve times to my sweet, innocent, adorable, and now soggy-around-the-edges pup, I chat briefly with my mother on the phone, cruise back up to the high school, sprint (literally) across the parking lot, meet her at the door, grab her house key, sprint back to the car, and possibly come close to breaking a traffic or three as I rush home to get my four-legged friend inside.

It could've been worse, of course. I didn't lose my pup at the airport. But still: today, she gets lots and lots of treats and love.