“Lost Keys” by Donna Steiner
In the last week or so I’ve been nearby when two close friends, in separate incidents, lost their respective car keys. We’re smack in the middle of winter here in New York; each friend had been wearing a heavy coat with roughly 100 pockets. We’re all teachers, too, and tend to carry bags with 1000 compartments. Because I was on hand, and because I can’t bear the thought of incidental and avoidable loss, I joined in the searches for the keys. One hunt took place at school, after hours, and included a fairly large office, a fairly large briefcase, aforementioned fairly large coat, and a flat-out big parking lot. The parking lot, I should mention, was covered with snow. The second hunt took place in my own home and, although I will not name the person who lost the key, I will mention that the search included not one but two coats, a pair of snow pants (yes, the kind that children wear, although this was not a child), a snow-covered driveway and a series of snowy but shoveled stairs leading to the house. Neither key was recovered.
As Elizabeth Bishop eloquently wrote, one should really just accept the fluster of lost keys, the hour badly spent. And so it was – the fluster was accepted, the hour(s) badly spent, although, in truth, there are worse ways to spend an hour. Flashlights were returned to their utility rooms, I gave the first friend a ride home, the second realized she had a spare key, life returned to normal.
Although the lost keys remain undiscovered, I discovered a thing or two about my friends. My colleague, the first friend, has very clean pockets. They were, in fact, virtually empty. A little lint, perhaps, but he travels light.
The other individual, on the contrary, had just a few things in her pockets, but in combination they create an intriguing portrait. She carried dog biscuits, some of which were in crumb form; cigarette butts and attendant loose tobacco; wood chips; dried, crushed flower petals and bits of leaves; and an old greasy silver bolt – the kind that might fall out of a large piece of machinery.
This unique collection prompted some idle musing; I began to think about whether I’d prefer to be known by the things I carry or the things I’ve lost. In the latter category, a silver (capped) tooth as a child; a beloved grandmother who liked to tell jokes at wakes and kept a collection of beer bottle caps; a mutt who wandered off one day and never came home. Lovers and friends. Too many hopes & dreams & illusions to specify. I suffered the singular anguish of losing hundreds of documents and files when a computer crashed. It crashed in slow motion, over a period of hours; it was like watching a ship sink with my whole life on board.
The crash inspired one of the things I now carry: thumb drives. I have two at home and one at school, and I back up every new piece of writing in all three places plus in a file I email to myself. I carry, in other words, some good degree of neuroticism and/or paranoia that I might again lose my files. More tangibly, I carry two separate small notebooks – one a spiral-bound, antique-looking journal that says NOTE BOOK on its cover and has a sort of subtitle or slogan: “Most advanced quality Gives best writing features.” I have no idea what that means, exactly, nor can I explain the interesting capitalization choice – perhaps it was translated from another language – but I use it to jot down assignments for my students; after one semester’s use, it’s nearly full. The other notebook says IDEA on the cover, so I use it for ideas unrelated to teaching. I’ve had the notebook for ten years and have made notes on exactly eight of its eighty pages, or “feuillets,” which is, in fact, French. I carry at least two pens, one with black ink and one with blue. Everyone should carry something slightly embarrassing; I’ll confess to four potentially clean/potentially used tissues. And I carry the bag that carries all of this stuff. It’s green and it’s old and although I love it, I’ll be retiring it at the start of the impending semester – the individual mentioned above, she of the biscuits and flowers and bolt, gave me for Christmas a very spiffy canvas briefcase with endless compartments, in which, no doubt, I’ll carry many things and lose a few.
Would I rather be known by what I’ve lost or what I carry? In the end, I think, they become as one, like twinning helices, a tangle of yearning and gratefulness. “Lose something every day,” Bishop wrote. Even if it is, as alas it must always be, the dearest day itself.
“Lost Keys” is a brand-new essay by Donna Steiner, an LAR Fall 2009 contributor. Her essay “Hummingbird, Dictionary” appears on p. 46 of that issue, No. 6. Speaking of losing things, she recently lost a battle with a patch of black ice. We wish her tweaked back a speedy but thorough recuperation.