The Collector Turns Into A Keys Loser
By: Janice Arenofsky
Tags: Walking, Keys, Housing Development, Exercise, Losing

Personal Essay

The Collector Turns Into A Keys Loser

Photo by Samantha Lam on Unsplash

Those of you who follow me — all two or three of you — may recall that I’ve written about my husband as a collector of bolas, nautical artifacts, license plates, you name it.

Well, time has passed, and the collector has progressed to the point of no return. I mean this literally. He has lost so many keys that returning to his car and home have become feats of great courage.

No, he doesn’t have dementia. Yet. It’s what I would call sloppiness carried to the extreme. When you can no longer hide your stuff under heaps of clothing or cushions or athletic wear, you must resort to the next best thing, which is, losing your stuff.

So my husband has decided to lose the keys to the house. It wouldn’t bother me nearly as much as it does if he weren’t losing my keys too. First he loses his own, then he asks to borrow mine, and promptly loses them.

Yesterday he came home from his usual one-hour walk around our convoluted neighborhood, and informed me he could not find my keys. He says he must have lost them when he pulled out his cell phone to answer a call, probably from one of his stupid clients.

Naturally he didn’t hear the keys drop, so he had no idea where he might have dropped them. As he prepared to retrace his footsteps, purportedly to search for the keys, he couldn’t seem to come up with the name of the main drag that circumnavigates our development. He got stuck on the word “Arabella” somehow when the correct name is “Arabian,” as in “The Arabian horse took first prize at the show.”

By then he was a mite nervous about returning home with the news that he again lost a set of keys, so he began asking people he spotted where Arabella street was. Well, of course it doesn’t exist, so no one knew the answer. Anyway, he appeared so distraught that one neighbor got the novel idea that my husband was really lost. His working hypothesis was that my husband was confused due to age, or senility, or both.

The outcome was that this concerned and helpful neighbor called the police. Well, the police, according to my husband, who cheerfully rattled off this story as if it were something you’d want to read in Readers Digest, could not have been nicer. In fact the cops also were concerned and helpful and finally convinced that my husband wasn’t crazy and that he was really just stupid. They didn’t say that last adjective, but I’m sure that’s what they were thinking. So they rode him around in their police car looking for the keys he was still pursuing valiantly.

Naturally they didn’t find the keys either.

There was nothing for me to do after sitting through this lengthy, boring story that yielded nothing but recriminations all the way around, but to retrace his footsteps and look for the keys. So I set off on my own trek.

If a grown man couldn’t quite remember the word “Arabian” and sorta got lost during a walk around a neighborhood that is, I grant you, a tangle of greenbelts and circles, then how could I trust his eyes? Perhaps, I reasoned, he just didn’t see what was right in front of him. Maybe I could be his better set of eyes.

So I walked and walked and walked and guess what, I couldn’t find the keys either even though I remembered the word “Arabian” the whole time. To be fair, if you’re not a GPS, you can get lost in our development, I admitted to myself, especially if your concentration is kaput because you’re talking on a cell phone to some pain in the ass client.

So as it stands now, my husband, the police, and I cannot find the keys. And I don’t give a flying f**ck!