The key to success

I took my 7-year-old granddaughter to the Orem Library the other night to hear Carmen Deedy.
Alyson is interested in storytelling and how storytellers get their ideas and how they make their stories funny.
I was trying to help her see that many of the stories are simply based on real life incidents: The story Donald Davis tells of his embarrassing moment in the Christmas pageant when he discovered his robe was open and revealing his bare legs and his undershorts to the world, the story Nannette Watts tells of falling off the garage roof in the middle of stealing the neighbor's plums.
I told her it was a lot like writing a newspaper column years ago.
Whenever something bad or traumatic or particularly humiliating occurred, I had the comfort of knowing it would at least provide fodder for a column.
Amazing how that still works today.
There's something bonding in sharing minor miseries.
We then decided to bail on the storytelling because although Carmen is interesting in real life, she wasn't telling stories. She was just participating in a conversation with this guy and it didn't engage a 7-year-old.
Rather than make her sit through something that bored her, we grabbed our stuff and skedaddled as inconspicuously as possible.
We got out to the car and I hunted in my purse for my keys.
They were nowhere. We trooped back inside and "inconspicuously" looked where we'd been sitting.
I remembered it was raining when we arrived and I hurriedly grabbed the umbrella and my purse and locked the door before I slammed it.
Perhaps the keys were still in the car.
I looked. Yep. There they were just out of reach.
I sighed. I could call my husband who was in a class in Salt Lake.
I could call Alyson's mom who lives in Eagle Mountain.
We could walk home to American Fork.
I called my daughter who was in the bathtub. She said she'd get dressed and be right over when the lady next to us said, "You know, you can go over to the police station and they have a guy who'll come pop the window. I've done it lots of times."
We ended up making the trek over to the station, admitting my foolishness, proving my car was really mine and getting an officer to come over in his squad car with his tools.
A few minutes later, we were good to go.
As we buckled up, Alyson said to me, "Grandma? Is this the kind of stupid stuff you were talking about?"
I think so.