How to Lose Your Car Keys: A Farewell
No. I understand. You don’t want to lose your car keys. No one wants to lose their car keys. I’m not suggesting you proactively seek out such unfortunate and inconvenient circumstances. But anyone who has lost her keys (I assume that is all of you) knows that said circumstances typically find you, not the other way around.
There, of course, are ways to diminish the chances that one loses her car keys. One might commit to putting the keys in the exact same place at the beginning, middle and end of each day. I know all you “personal responsibility” ambassadors out there are affirmatively nodding your heads in agreement right now. Or there are the technocrats who would prefer to rely on the As On TV beepers and lights that will guide you to the crevice of the sofa couch in those angst-filled moments when you are the most aware of the absence of your car keys. Even better, my understanding is that many of the youths living in the urban centers of the world are disavowing driving altogether, eliminating this category of turmoil from their lives entirely (the youth are so smart and they will save us! Save us, youth!)
We took a different approach. Our strategy for preventing lost keys went all the way back to the root of the problem, the actual acknowledgement that one has lost her keys. One must be conscious of the lost keys before there are lost keys. You see what I’m saying? Very zen. This is deep stuff. In other words, we went so long without driving our own car on the East Coast, that we did not know we had lost our keys until we were back here on the West Coast – 3 thousand miles away. In hindsight, not the best strategy.
When you sit with the thought a little longer, you might even come to think that, indeed, losing complete awareness of your keys or other important items is a strategy better suited for, as it were, losing those items...
But best to not think too hard.
Regardless of your personal best practices for car key retention, there is no denying that one set of Dusty’s car keys is out there along the eastern seashore somewhere. Could literally be anywhere. They are a lost cause. Unless you find them – then let me know! With this loss, I’m compelled to pen a brief eulogy:
That set of car keys lived an active life on a notable purple carabineer, and was part of a prominent key chain family, all of whom we were sadly lost along with the car keys. Goodbye to the palm tree shaped bottle opener who started life at ASU college parties opening Blue Moons, but really matured over the years, opening local craft beers and natural wine bottles in his last days. Goodbye to the tool that was meant to help a person shotgun beers, originating at Andrew’s bachelor party yet somehow ending up on my key chain. And goodbye to that other key that remained a mystery, never opening anything regularly, but just shiny enough that I was unwilling to get rid of it because it might be important someday. The car keys and the whole key chain family leave behind a spare set of car keys, Dusty the 4runner, and a collection of camper keys who they were very close with.
May the purple carabineer key chain family rest in power.
