Subway Stop

My husband needed to be in Portland for a meeting, so we made it into a family affair. We enjoyed Voodoo Donuts, Apizza Scholls – in short, our favourite Portland haunts – but mostly Powell’s Book Store, making multiple visits to this wonderful Mecca of books.

It was at Powell’s that I lost one of my favorite brooches. Laden with rhinestones aplenty, it was pinned onto my black felt hat which I’d hung on a coat hook in the women’s bathroom. When I left the bathroom to resume prowling for books, I took my jacket but somehow left the hat. When I returned for it, it was already gone. A search of the store was unsuccessful; my brooch was truly gone. Oh, well. In such cases as these I endeavor to think, “I hope that whoever has it now enjoys it as it continues on its journey”. Such is Karma. You lose things, you acquire things. It’s not so important, although I did love that pin.

Our days at Powell’s passed, my husband’s meeting was about to start and it was time for me and the kids to leave Portland for home. It was a chilly September morning and rain threatened. We said goodbye to Michael, and I once again established myself as the world’s worst-ever professor’s wife (on this day, this was my husband’s colleague, saying hello to my husband curbside and addressing me, “Hi, you must be Michael’s wife!” Me: “Yes, I’m one of his sister-wives…”). Our kids and I piled back into our car (we still had one at the time), and off we went to points north where Home lay. I knew there was a baseball game at in Seattle (a few hours north of Portland, for all of you without an open atlas on your laps) and, not wanting to get caught in the mass exodus after the game, I monitored the game’s progress on the radio as we drove on the interstate.

We were still about an hour’s drive outside of Seattle when lunch started to sound like a good idea. Doing the mental trigonometry of distance from the stadium in south Seattle and the game’s progress, I figured that our food stop would have to be quick so that we didn’t spend the afternoon on the expressway with the game crowd as everyone headed homeward. Choosing speed over delectability, we stopped at a Subway just off the expressway. As we got out of the car outside our chosen Subway, I looked at the sky and noted the mammatus cloud formations, my favorite type of clouds (thanks to my son, who has had the heart of a Meteorologist from the time he was 7 years old), and added rain to the prospective joys of driving home that afternoon.  

First things first, we got the key to the locked bathroom: first the kids, then I, availed ourselves of the facilities. Then, we ordered our sandwiches, got back into the car and ate on the road. Listening to the radio and gauging the game’s progress, our drive became a tug-of-war between my wanting to leapfrog the potential traffic jam after the game let out and my reluctance to speed. It was going to be close: we were still about 30 minutes south of the stadium and the game was in its 9th inning. The visiting team was winning, so if the home team didn’t tie the score we were screwed, traffic-wise. The inning wound down as my nerves wound up. Then, A Run! The score was tied, the game would continue and we were saved from being stuck in post-game traffic. 

And so, we made it past south Seattle and her stadium in good time, and arrived home without major delays. The kids made a beeline for the TV, I cleaned out our snack bags and happily put away our Trader Joe’s loot. Then it was time to clean out my purse.

I wasn’t sure what to think when I pulled out the 24-inch long (x 2-inch wide) hunk of wood with a small silver key attached. Surely, you’ve seen similar strategies which mate strange or bulky materials to a small, easy-to-lose-or-forget-key, strategies employed by businesses to prevent people from walking off with access to their bathroom. They work really well. Apparently.

Back in my kitchen I mentally processed, and stared mutely at, what I held in my hand, which was a chunk of plywood as big as my forearm that read,”SUBWAY RESTROOM KEY, PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE” in big, block letters, “PLEASE KEEP THE BATHROOM CLEAN”. There was still lots of space on the wood left over. Nice going, Julie, I told myself.

I resolved to mail the key back to the Subway that was now missing its washroom key – then I remembered that 1) Subway is the most common fast food chain in the US, and 2) I had no idea where on the map we had actually stopped for lunch. I put the key in the kitchen “Miscellaneous” drawer where, to my dismay, it did not magically vanish. A couple of weeks later, my husband, home again, found it and inquired as to its origins. I explained, and he looked at me in disbelief before throwing away the key, the first time he’d done so in such a literal fashion. Karma, indeed, although I’m not sure of the lesson here, unless somewhere in Western Washington there is someone – wearing a fabulous newly-found rhinestone pin – trying desperately to get into that Subway bathroom.