As I was walking out of the house this morning I realized I’d lost my keys. We couldn’t find them anywhere and after rehashing the previous day’s last entrance through the gate we came to the conclusion that I must have left them in the lock. Later we tore the house apart looking for them but came up empty. So I removed the lock and set out to find a locksmith (since we could only assume someone had taken the keys and now had full access to the house). And yes, our central location did it again—the locksmith was not even two blocks away. A very old man sat sleeping in a chair—surrounded by decades-old calendars and the detritus of probably fifty years of keys and locks—when I walked into his home/business. It took a bit of banging around to roust him, but once I had he said he’d have it for me in a couple of hours.

When Ouest got home Ali emptied her backpack of papers and gym clothes and promptly discovered my missing set of keys in the bottom. How or why they would have ended up there on a Sunday neither of us can comprehend.

I was bummed thinking we’d just thrown away good money on a lock for no reason. I went to pick up the lock and spent fifteen minutes watching the old man try to put the last two small screws in place, not knowing whether it would be rude to offer assistance or not. I finally reached over and did it for him. He didn’t seem to think it was rude. He handed over two new keys to the repinned lock and asked me for the equivalent of seven dollars. Now instead of feeling like I’d thrown money away I felt as if I’d just done my good deed for the day.

On the way to school this morning I asked Ouest to let me take her picture in her new school dress. Lowe walked up so close to her that his toes were on hers. He really looks up to her and wants to be a part of everything she does. Happily for me Ouest took the opportunity to instinctively reach out and put her arm around him. He was one very happy little boy in that moment.

Lowe and I went for a long walk this morning to the park, the beach, and home again. A good two and a half hour round-trip for a two-year-old. It’s fun simply walking around with kids when they are this age—everything is interesting. We spent twenty minutes playing with a giant inflatable beer can outside a Modelorama (beer store—and no, I don’t mean liquor store). And probably a combined thirty minutes just looking in the windows of VW bugs.