The Keys to Life

I can’t find my keys. I really can’t find them, and it’s ridiculous because my keys are huge. I have things I needed to do today, and I am totally stranded at home. I have no house keys, no car keys, and no keys to the place I was going today. This doesn’t happen to me often. I’m not one of those people who needs a spare key in every room or tracking devices on their keychains because I am always very diligent about putting my keys back in my purse. However, today, my keys have walked off the planet, and I’m becoming concerned. Growing up, my mom was constantly misplacing her keys. As a kid I thought it was funny, you know, silly mom, everyone playing the Find-the-Key game. I remember she had this ginormous safety pin that she used as a keychain just so that she could always find them. That eight inch safety pin may have been useful in finding them once she DID lose them, but she always would manage to lose them, no matter what kind of keychain she had. As a self-centered and impatient teenager however, mom losing her keys was less and less funny. I wanted to be at the mall five minutes ago, and there we were, looking for keys. I was a brat, but a brat that firmly vowed to keep up with my keys. I lost my keys one time when my kids were babies. Once. That was all it took. I had to break into my house, and it was funny and terrible and I was way too fat to be climbing in windows. So, in the tradition of the absent minded women before me, I obtained a very large keychain, and kept adding to it. My keychains got so out of control that Richy forced me to remove just the car key so I wouldn’t break the ignition switch in the car. I can take it on and off of a carabiner that is also attached to my keychain collection. I say all of this to say it is damn near impossible to lose this wad of keys, but here we are. I have torn this house apart. I have uncushioned the couch, I’ve looked under things, looked in every room, checked the fridge (I did lose a cell phone in the fridge once, so it wasn’t that odd). I’ve looked in the dish drainer, on all the flat surfaces, I even looked in the dog kennel. Those damn keys are nowhere to be found. I checked in the car, I checked on the train, and on a plane, I checked in the rain, and checked in the drain, I checked everywhere, Sam I Am. It’s not that I think they won’t turn up, I know they probably will, but I needed to leave the house today. I had things to do and responsibilities (people insist on giving me responsibilities under the delusion that I am a grown up). I am mostly just absolutely bamboozled by the idea that these keys can’t be seen from space, much less by the idea that I can’t find them in a loft apartment that’s smaller than a thousand square feet. For now, I suppose I will ransack my house again in the hopes of finding my lost keys but at this point I really don’t know where else to look. Maybe I’ll try summoning them. A five point star in the middle of the floor should suffice, but what does one add to the points to summon keys? UPDATE: The keys have been summoned from the depths of couch hell. They had been locked away under the couch, back against the wall and inside the lining. I don’t know what they did to deserve such a spot in couch hell, but it took me fifteen minutes, two canes and a headlamp to retrieve them from their seclusion.