Lost keys? She can relate

The guy walking behind me to the Delta terminal at  Kennedy Airport stopped and yelled, "Hey lady, are those your keys?" He pointed, and kept walking with his family.

A clump lay on the sidewalk.

I looked around. No one else was within shouting distance. The keys were fairly worn and had heft. I had a burst of empathy for the person who lost them because I habitually lose track of things -- cellphones, pocketbooks, credit cards, receipts, medical forms, instructions -- and that always sends me into a panic. It's not an age thing. When I was young, it was textbooks, shoes, permission slips, hair brushes and wallets.

Panic and I are longtime companions.

My car keys hide almost every morning. My husband tries to help me find them quickly, and usually does. He once bought me a remote-controlled beeper for them. Whenever I was searching, I'd push a button and the device would screech, telling me where the keys were.

It worked until I misplaced the remote.

Maybe I wouldn't be doing a daily search if I used the hook my husband installed in the hall closet just for my keys, but I'm not that disciplined.

So I started buying wallets with key rings attached. The latest gadget I have for my car keys is a zippered pouch in a glitzy hot pink. It's garish and large -- and easier to find when I'm trying to race out the door.

My mother loses things occasionally, too. But now she relies on St. Anthony -- the Catholic patron saint of lost items, the poor and travelers -- to help her. "Whenever you lose something," my brother instructed her, "pray to St. Anthony to help you find it."

She's asked for an assist from St. Anthony a bunch of times and feels familiar enough to call him St. Tony. I don't think it matters what religion you are. St. Anthony doesn't discriminate. But when I'm in a panic, I rarely remember to ask for his help. If you've never called on St. Anthony and want to give it a shot, there are several prayers available online; type "St. Anthony lost items prayer" in your search engine.

Understanding the trauma that can come with losing something, I saw this as an opportunity to return the keys and a chance to put someone at ease. I hunted for a spot where I could prominently hang them. Maybe the person would come back and see them.

But I wasn't prepared for this emergency. I didn't have ribbon, string or tape. Even if I did, I wasn't sure how airport security would react to a ring of 10 keys tied to the door handle of the AirTrain lobby at the parking garage.

I looked at the keys again. No name, no phone number. A smart omission in this day of identity theft. But then I saw a supermarket keychain tag, the plastic kind with a bar code the cashier scans before you pay for your groceries. This one was purple, shaped like a half-moon, with the Stop & Shop logo. Many of us have at least one of these tags to get the special "deals" each store offers. Some people have key rings filled with them.

It should be possible to track the owner through the Stop & Shop tag, but this was Saturday, and I realized that even though I'm a journalist, Stop & Shop wouldn't likely divulge any information about the tag owner to me. I wanted the owner to get them as quickly as possible. So, first thing Monday, I called Gary Lewi, senior executive vice president of Rubenstein Associates, the Manhattan-based public relations firm. Stop & Shop is one of his clients.

"Generally," he said, "what would happen is that you would mail them to us, and we would mail them to the customer."

I said that that would take too long, and I was hoping I could prevent the owner from having to replace the keys. Lewi agreed and offered to pick them up at Newsday's Melville office.

So the story has a happy ending. The keys belong to James Bumpass, 74, of Hempstead, who retired in 1998 after working 34 years as a bus driver and dispatcher in Queens.

Bumpass, who was very grateful to get his keys back, said he thought he dropped them at a local strip mall. When I told him where I had picked them up, he realized they must have fallen from his belt loop when he was taking his niece to the airport.

The most important thing on the ring, he said, was his gasoline pass, a tiny black rod he holds up to the gas pump for a quick fill-up. The multiple keys were duplicates to unlock his house, garage and other doors.

"My wife is always losing keys," he said, "and I make sure I have enough of them."

Duplicate keys. Bumpass is on to something.