Safe Place
By ice rivers
- 140 reads
I was heading to a wedding.
I had my trusty Yashica SLR with me.
I approached an area that I had passed a hundred times but never before noticed. For some reaosn, I not only noticed that spot this but decided that it might be right for a photo. I pulled my Maverick to the side of the road. I took a closer look at the location ready to snap but conscious that I only had 30 exposures left on the role. I didn't like to waste snaps.
I scouted around for a twenty minutes and couldn't find the shot. No problem. I walked back to the Mav and prepared to pull away. Everything was right on schedule but I needed to get moving if I was going to make my connection.
One problem
I didn't have my car keys.
I searched all around the interior of the car.
Nope.
They must have dropped out of my pocket when I was trying to find an image to photograph on a spot that I had passed by hundreds of times without the slightest attraction; a spot so non-descript that even though I wanted to take a photo of something invisible within it I could find nothing to capture.
I was beginning to run out of time if I wanted to catch a ride with my buddies to the wedding. They weren't expecting me but I knew there would be room for one more. I figured that I'd be a nice surprise.
I got out of my car once again and retraced my steps. Suddenly tihs piece of land went from attractive to infuriating and from inffuriating to threatening. I looked and looked for half an hour.
Nope.
Meanwhile, I was burning up with anger. I had a terrible habit of putting things someplace safe and not remembering where that safe place was when I needed to find whatever I had placed there. The mechanism worked like this...."Don't lose this now....put it in a place that's safe......a place that you will remember where you put it.... there's a good place....put it there......remember it.
And then I would forget where that place was until it became the very last place that I looked.
The clock was ticking.
I had to be in the village at noon. It was already fifteen minutes until noon. I had another hour to travel to get to the village but I was going nowhere fast.
I made my way back to the car...down hearted and self-loathing.
I took a seat on the hood of my car and lit up a smoke. Maybe that would calm me down.
Nope
I had searched the car previously but decided to give it another look. What the hell else was I gonna do. I had already missed my connection; that didn't matter any more. This was waaaaay before cell phones and I was still stranded in the middle of nowhere.
I went around the front of the car to the driver side entrance.
And there....in the lock.... glowing like a sword in the stone were the keys.
I have no idea how they got into that lock.
I couldn't imagine myself putting them there or overlooking them when I came back to the car not once but twice.
No idea to this day, although I have many theories most of them spiritual/supernatural.
I definitely was going to miss the wedding.
I went home.
The next day, I decided to go back to the village to find out about the wedding.
When I got there, I discovered out that the car I would have been traveling in if I had made my surprise connection had crashed. Two of my friends were in the hospital in serious life changing condition and another one had died in the crash. I would have been in that car if it weren't for the Yashica, and the forgotten keys in the "safe" place.
RIP MIke Flanagan
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