The keys to my kingdom

Keys, wallet, cell phone. That's my basic checklist every time I leave my house. But it does leave me to wonder why I have so many keys.

Some of them I have to have of course. The keys to my house, my car, and the old barn for example. I can't work, get back into the house, or drive without them. Yet even there I find duplicity. Two house keys are on my key ring: the one I use and the original key, the first one we got when we bought our house in 1981. The original one has worn down so bad I was afraid I'd break it off in the lock, so I had a second made. Yet I keep the first one with me. It's too sentimental, perhaps, that I do. But I do.

I always have my keys to our place in da UP, in Hessel, on me. It makes me feel as though I could at any time, on a whim essentially, just say forget everything and go up north. Sure, I haven't ever came close to actually doing that. But hey, maybe one day as I leave Indianapolis after a sales trip I might just think that I'll drive up Interstate 69 and into US 127 by Lansing and onto Interstate 75 just before Grayling and go straight to Hessel. That can't happen if I don't have my Hessel keys.

I still have my last classroom key, which I think I was supposed to have turned in. But I haven't taught since January 2010, and the Warren Consolidated Schools know where to find me if they need it. I'd be shocked if the locks haven't been changed anyway. Especially to keep me out.

I even still have the key to the gym of old St. Alphonsus in Dearborn, from when I was a coach there. I know they've changed that lock. I don't care if they have. I haven't had to use it since 2003.

There are keys from old locks which are so gone to history that I'll never be able to figure out where they went. I mean keys to locks we had at the Shop in the 1970s. I carry old suitcase keys, an old locker key from when the Detroit Curling Club was on Drake road in West Bloomfield, and one which I haven't a clue of its origin. And I keep them all.

I just think of it as small time hoarding.