flying keys

Mollie, Jude, and I were driving back from Wal-Mart this afternoon when we spied a cute little boy at his lemonade stand. He was about five or six and looked pleased, though it was a certain sign that this is a new generation of lemonade entrepreneurs, as he was talking on a cell phone! We bought two cups and drove away, smiling. Not only was it good lemonade, but Mollie decided that we ought to never drive pass a lemonade stand.

When I came home I remembered the story of the flying keys.

When I was about 10, my father bought a hardware store. When I was 25, he closed it out and moved what was left of the inventory home to his basement. Some children liked to explore in the woods or the park...mine loved my dad's basement, with its dusty oil filters, automotive belts, pseudo-tupperware, and bits of this and that, all mingled together with the smell of wet dog!

One day, Clayton and Sam found what they thought was buried treasure, a box of old keys that had been cut but would not fit the doors they had been intended to lock. Why they had never been thrown away, only my dad could have told, but they asked him if they could have the keys and of course he said yes.

They brought them home and pondered what they could do with this menagerie of keys. One of them had the idea of taking rubber bands from their newspaper route bag and knotting a band through each hole of each key. With the right amount of stretch-snap, they had invented the flying key.

Of course, after about an hour of shooting them through the air in the back yard, one of them had the great idea of selling them, door to door. So, off they went, down Elm Street, looking for customers who were waiting on baited breath for a flying key saleman to knock.

We were all amazed when, at the end of the afternoon, they had sold three keys to some guy in the next block. Several other doors later, the boys realized they hadn't really discovered the world's next frisbee!