I have a collection of keys, and I don’t know what they all go to. I have lived in five houses, three of them in other states. I have taught in six schools, four of them in other states. Somehow I have collected keys. None of them fit the doors or locks in my current house nor the school where I teach.
How did I get them?
In this last move, I unpacked a box marked “Bedroom.” In it were a few clothes, a couple pairs of shoes, some empty hangers, and a couple of smaller boxes. In one of these boxes were some items from my dresser–a phone charger, a glasses case, and a roll of tape.
There was also a ring of keys.
I put them in my pocket, and went on unpacking. The thing about moving is that you never really finish moving in, and you never really finish unpacking, either. I heard a guy once say that all the furniture in our lives is just making its way to the dump. That’s a sad thought about buying stuff, but it’s true of course. Some of it might make its way to the homes of our children for a bit, or end up in a different closet or attic for a few years, but really it is all just going to the dump eventually.
And there are some things when you move that never get taken out of their box. They get put in an attic or a basement, sitting there for years and years until someone makes the decision to throw them away. If the things are lucky they might get repurposed or recycled. I never thought about the fate of keys until I found the ring of mysterious ones that day. What do you do with keys?
House keys usually get given to the next owner. They have a better than average chance of staying with the house they belong to until the house is gone, or until the locks get changed. Did I change the locks on that first house in Tennessee, or did I just transfer them to the new owner with all the documents of ownership? I can’t remember.
And the next house. We were the first owners, so we had those keys first. What happened to them? I guess we gave them to the next owners. And the last house we lived in, in Tennessee, those keys were handed off to the next owners as well.
When we moved to West Virginia, there were keys given to us for the house we bought. There were a lot of keys. Every door had a different lock, and two of the doors had a deadbolt lock and a separate door handle lock. Entering the house through the front door was like Scrooge going into his mansion, with all the jingling and jangling. I always meant to have the locks consolidated–one key fits all. But as that was going to be our forever house, as far as we knew then, that project got bumped down the list to lesser importance.
Now I’m unpacking again, and I have all these keys.
They look like they could be house keys, I guess, but some of them look like some other kind of key. Not a car key, like a fob or something, but they are all just flat regular looking keys.
They all have a patina of age. Like they’ve been keys a long time. They also look unused. They look abandoned, They look useless.
They look lost.
I’ve lost some keys in my day. When I was in second grade I became what would come to be known as a latchkey child, kids who went home to empty houses after school, letting themselves in with a key. I was terrified of losing this key, and sure enough I lost it. I had it around my neck, but I kept running through scenarios where I would lose it. Then I moved it to my pocket, and I thought of about a hundred ways to lose it that way, too. So I moved it to my coat pocket hanging in my cubby. But that seemed especially precarious, so I went to move it again. Somewhere along the way I lost it.
I lost a key to my second house. I gave it to the housekeeper we hired at the time, and she supposedly returned it to my wife. I never saw it again.
And there have been many times when I have been in a panic, dashing about the house from flat surface to flat surface, asking to myself out loud, “Where are my keys?”
We have never had the habit of a bowl or container by the entry to put keys in when we enter the house. I see that on TV and in movies, and I always think how clever that is. The keys are always right where you put them. Me, the keys go in a pocket. Pants pocket, mostly, but sometimes a jacket or sweater pocket. The insane amount of keys I have on my person could possibly shatter a bowl by the door. The weight of them already makes me walk at an angle. Not really, but the bowl by the door strategy is not an option. So if I change pants or jacket I’m at a disadvantage.
Let’s say I do put the keys in my jacket, which is not where they usually go. Then I put the jacket down somewhere instead of hanging it in the closet. Now the keys and the jacket are out of their usual place. So when I need my keys, I have no imagination about where to look for them. I eventually find them, but it is most likely because I am combing every inch of the house looking for them, and by mere zone saturation I come across them.
A couple of times they have fallen out of my pocket while I am sitting on a couch or a recliner. They almost never get found when that happens.
I feel sometimes that my keys are dying to get away from me. I imagine them thinking they are enslaved to the little key ring, tethered there like slaves, forced to do work when I need them, then shoved into the dark with no food or water. If those were my living conditions, I might be looking for the first opportunity to escape, do a deep dive into the couch cushions, or flee into a corner of the room behind something heavy.
Maybe that is what I have here, these unfamiliar, alien looking keys. Maybe they are refugees, from some abusive pocket or stubborn lock. Maybe they are not even all related to each other except by their will to survive in someone else’s pocket or on someone else’s bureau. Perhaps they are just ready to retire, to lounge about in a bowl by a door, no longer interested in unlocking anything, just wanting the time to pass them by without making any demands.
I feel superstitious about throwing them away. In one sense, I figure that as soon as I let them go I will find what they were meant to open and I won’t have them. That is the surest way to find out where they belong, if the rest of my life holds true. Throw it away or buy a new one, and the thing you already had suddenly reappears. Something makes me want to hold on to these keys.
Some day I will stand at a door. It will be locked. I will try all the keys I have on my person. I will pat my pockets. I will ponder my options. And then it will hit me: It’s those keys, those keys I have that I never threw away. I know just where they are, I will think to myself. They are there where all the other useless things are, useless until they are needed, and if I could just get there and get those keys I could get into this place which I am trying to access.
It is at that moment that the keys will leave me, as mysteriously and as hauntingly as they arrived. And then how will I ever find them?