Have You Seen My Keys?

I swore I put them.....

Wednesday, was another one of those “where are the keys” kind of days. As I sat outside and typed some correspondence, I watched as my husband and brother searched high and low for a hopeful second set of keys. Turned out my husband locked dad’s workshop keys inside the workshop. The simple twist of a lock on the doorknob.

He was rebuilding a fence afterall…. and it was hot.

So, knowing our history with keys, lost keys in the house, keys spiraling into the black hole of the car, keys dropped in the sand on the beach by a toddler (searching into the evening with flashlights, some of us in tears), hide-a-keys not in the hidden box, keys in pants pockets hung back in the closet (or in jacket pockets), keys sparkly and clean from laundry day, tumbling loudly in the dryer, scattered keys in containers, drawers, dishes, random baskets, tons of mini keys for luggage that no one has anymore but look great in a random jewelry box, yet don’t fit in the keyhole of that jewelry box, etc… I’ve come to the conclusion that keys are a maddening subject.

If I added up the time it took to search for missing keys, well, in my birth family, if anything is missing it’s hunted down for days like it’s on the FBI’s most wanted list. So I’m thinking I might have lost a year just searching for keys and random things like paper lists and receipts (but we won’t go there).

Exasperated, I decided to google:

“How many people go missing keys every year?”

The response:

Sometimes, they show up. But other times, they really are lost. More than 20 million people in the United States lose their car and house keys every year.

What on earth is our problem with keys? and why can’t we have a better system for them?

According to a study in Britain that included three thousand respondents, an average person loses up to nine items a day. Guess what item is among the top of these items? The keys! Most people who lose their keys spend about fifteen minutes every day searching. We are not “most people” as mentioned above.

At what point do you give up looking for your keys?… replace locks, hire a locksmith, etc.?

It’s really common for older people to lose or misplace just about anything, especially with memory loss, yet people from all age groups tend to lose their keys.

Why is losing the keys such a common occurrence? Scientists say that there are a lot of factors. Stress and fatigue can lead to poor memory, misplacement and forgetfulness. (accept we are on holiday right now, so I’m gonna call it “vacation let-down" where there is no thinking at all)

Time of day can be a factor as well. Early in the morning the brain has not fully woken up. People are known to walk out the door without their keys. Or perhaps you set them down the day or evening before and you are too tired when you wake up to remember where you put them.

You can actually take a “picture” of where you put your keys! It’s a part of your brain called a hippocampus. This is where long-term memory formation and memory retrieval is stored. Other vertebrates and mammals have this function as well.

---

Interesting facts:

The earliest description of the ridge running along the floor of the temporal horn of the lateral ventricle comes from the Venetian anatomist Julius Caesar Aranzi (1587), who likened it first to a silkworm and then to a seahorse (Latin hippocampus, from Greek 'sea monster'). The German anatomist Duvernoy (1729), the first to illustrate the structure, also wavered between "seahorse" and "silkworm." "Ram's horn" was proposed by the Danish anatomist Jacob Winsløw in 1732; and a decade later his fellow Parisian, the surgeon de Garengeot, used cornu Ammonis – horn of Amun, the ancient Egyptian god who was often represented as having a ram's head. (wikipedia)

---

Neurologists suggest that you should be “mindful of your state of mind” whenever you place your keys somewhere. This is so that the retrieval process of the hippocampus snapshot would be a lot easier. The practice of retracing thoughts will set-up a path to discovery.

---

“Recall,” in memory, refers to the mental process of retrieval of information from the past. Along with encoding and storage, it is one of the three core processes of memory. There are three main types of recall: free recall, cued recall and serial recall.” (Wiki)

---

Growing up there were occasional conversations on how little we use the capacity of our brains. It is said that we only use 10 percent, however this is actually a myth.

“According to an interview with neurologist Barry Gordon in Scientific American. He explained that the majority of the brain is almost always active.”

The extra set of shop keys, which “we swore” dad had, weren’t found anywhere! So John bought a hacksaw, a new Kwikset and that was that.

On Thursday, I needed a picture of keys, for my story, so I took out a junk basket, dug through all the keys and found a baggie at the bottom with keys inside marked “second set - workshop keys.” It was my writing. While my brother felt looney, I seemed to recall mom and I looking for a second set of shop keys when dad wasn’t in such good shape (distracted brain). At the time, the original set wasn’t on the hook in the hallway (they did miraculously reappear there). The basket had been examined on Wednesday’s hunt, however we think the baggie was the culprit. All keys must remain loose so no one knows where they belong as you begin to test them all.

Perhaps we should think before we lock? or leave, but I think “key stories” are my absolute favorite and should go down in the memory books for generations to come.

I will leave you with another, out of about 500 key stories, and if you have any key adventures you’d like to share, please share them here! I’d like to know I am not alone in this key madness.

When I was 19 to 20 I flew with Golden West Airlines. On one of my first calls, as a stewardess, I drove my light yellow Subaru hatchback out to the middle of a cornfield in Oxnard, California, where I met up with my route. There was a double-wide trailer and a dirt parking lot. It was two full days of flying up and down the coast from San Diego to South Shore Lake Tahoe with an overnight in Bakersfield. When we landed back in Oxnard I was relieved, tired and exhilarated. As I fumbled for my keys, inhaling second hand smoke from my uniform (for some reason people smoked on aircrafts back then and it was like being in a flying ashtray), I realized they weren’t in my bag, nor my overnight case. I naturally walked to my car thinking I was stuck in a cornfield, trailer closed for the evening, with no plan, other than to wait for someone to end up where I was? There were a few randomly parked cars on the dirt. We didn’t have cell phones back then. I peered inside my car. Nothing. As I went around the back I saw my keys hanging from the hatchback keyhole. Perfectly safe place to leave them…

I swore they were with me.

1980 - 19 years old

This is another story…