It slides in, and you wiggle it gently. There’s a soft pressure differential where you can feel a slight resistance inside the mechanism. You turn. Something gives; there is a click. You open the door.
That is how we like it to go.
I am a professional key-holder. I have gotten really good at keeping other people’s keys organized—this is what they pay me for. I am the holder of the keys. I carry a large bundle, permanently hooked to a ring in my purse. In fact, I have reconfigured my entire work purse around first, carrying a laptop, and second, a bundle of other people’s keys.
I have encountered all sorts of locks. There’s the double-click lock, the multi-lock where you have to lift a handle to re-engage, and of course digital lockpads of many stripes and colors. I specialize in installing lockboxes—both manual and digital.
I wield this bundle of keys, rife with power, because I am helping people to sell their houses. When a house sells, the key loses its power; old keys get thrown away and locks get rekeyed. I’ve met all sorts of homeowners and observed varying degrees of human intimacy with keys. There are conscientious homeowners, who rekey immediately. There are organized homeowners who label their keys meticulously. There are harried homeowners, who lose their spare keys, and vigilant homeowners, who can barely loosen their grip as they nervously extend their hand to drop in my palm that little piece of metal giving me total control.
I can direct you to a plethora of key-cutting joints, and can give you a run-down of their prices, pros and cons. I’ve taken to withholding the keys from any who risk losing them; and from any who hold their power lightly.
Keys are all about access. And when you lose your keys, sometimes you also lose your access to the part of your brain that accesses the information to where you might have left that access, and then all goes to shit.
For an artsy type, I am now surprisingly organized when it comes to keys.
***
One of my favorite places in Vancouver (a city I called home for twenty years), is Science World. Flanked by the sea-wall in Vancouver’s Olympic Village Neighborhood, near the end of False Creek’s short saltwater inlet and in the heart of the city, Science World boasts a sea-mountain-city-scape that is sublime. My sister-in-law owns a condo near Science World, and when her assigned parking spot was available, she would give me access to her parking garage (along with access to her pool and gym.) You have to understand, each time you visit Science World, free parking will save you about $10 (plus a half hour circling the block on the hunt for street parking). If you’re going to lug a car full of children down there, a parking spot is a hot commodity.
Once, as I was getting ready to embark on one of these little expeditions, a lost key threw me for a loop. I was mid-pack, mid-child-corral, when I realized my sister-in-law’s condo garage key was missing. I flipped every drawer, nook and cranny inside out, increasingly angry at the key-shaped void in my brain.
The true misery came less from losing the thing, less from my day being stalled, and more from a sense of lost accountability. There’s forgiving yourself for causing yourself a minor inconvenience, and then there’s forgiving yourself for appearing as the disorganized fool that you know you probably are, especially in front of your generally organized, generous parking-spot-bestowing sister-in-law.
I eventually found it. It was in the key drawer, hooked onto an alternate key ring. There it sat, eternally unlabeled but authentically true to its parking-garage-key self.
I do not remember putting it there at all, although now I vaguely do.
Another time, I lost my car’s automatic key fob. I still had an actual ignition key, so I could still drive. But I had to manually insert the ignition key into the car door to gain entry, and I could only unlock one door at a time. A minor inconvenience in these days of remote entry, but a chagrin nonetheless.
A year after I first lost that fob, a quirky, hyper-spiritual Australian family visited the church where my husband was a pastor. They believed they were travelling through North America in response to an explicit command from God. Shortly after their introduction into our congregation, they told me in the name of God that I should “clean house”. I did — literally. I started with my daughter’s room. Lo and behold, the missing fob materialized. There it sat, in the depths of her closet, buried under a pile of blankets and luggage.
I took this serendipity to mean that the people were prophetic; only to find shortly after that they were probably not.
I could also tell the story of how I lost and then found my mother-in-law’s house key. But I will spare you the hysterics because this pattern just keeps folding in on itself. The key dropped out of my pocket when I bent down to pick tomatoes. That key happily sunned itself next to the tomatoes for a week. I’m not sure when I even realized that it was gone, but I was frantic for the few days in between losing and finding.
***
One night this past summer, someone broke into our car by smashing the driver window. They didn’t touch anything else, but they did dig through the center console—where my big bundle of work keys had been stored. The next morning, my heart in my throat, I gingerly picked up shards of broken glass, and rifled through the console to gage what might have been stolen. My work keys were gone.
Through the fog of panic, it hit me that the night before had been the one time where I had diverged from habit. After using my keys, I had thrown them into my purse instead of the car console, where I usually kept them.
Henceforth, never again would I leave my keys in the car. Hence the reorganized purse with the built-in key chain.
So yes, for an artsy type, I have grown surprisingly organized when it comes to keys—with a slight caveat ringing in my ears; there but for the grace of God go I.