I am washing my hands. It is my very first act upon arriving home, and I am performing it with uncommon vigor.
Nothing remarkable about that, you’re thinking. Everybody is washing their hands like crazy these days. True, but not everybody does so because they were looking for their car keys.
I’ll explain. I had finished an enjoyable hour practicing my tenor sax down at the Thornapple Plaza, which is a wonderful place to get in some licks outdoors in the evening and watch the sun set, and I was back at my car. I unlocked the door, took off my new ultra-snazzy, super-comfortable, spesh-ul neck strap, and tossed it in the back seat. Then I grabbed the case, set it atop the trunk of my Camry, disassembled my horn, and set it on the back seat as well.
There we go. All set, time to leave. I reached in my right jeans pocket, where I always carry my keys, and . . . nothing there. “Hm, okay,” I thought, “they’re in my jacket pocket. No, they’re not. Nuts. What did I do with them?”
I conducted a thorough search of my vehicle. Nothing. My horn case, maybe? Did I set the keys in it when I packed away my sax? I checked. Nope, not there. I retraced my steps from my vehicle to the stage and back again, scrutinizing the lawn, the pavement, every square foot where that old seductress, gravity, might tempt a key ring into leaping from my pocket. But no, no luck.
Was I beginning to panic? Ha! Not I. I always carry a spare set of keys for just such occasions–basic, but they’ll get me home. Still, this was no good. Besides holding a bunch of other important keys, my key ring bristles with little bar-coded cards for the library, grocery store, Pet Supplies Plus, and so on, as well as fingernail clippers and a small hex-head screwdriver whose purpose I’ve long forgotten. My key ring is like a pocket-size Rolodex of my life. I need it.
Then it dawned on me: the trash barrel. When I set the sax on the back seat, I had grabbed a handful of clutter as I emerged and traipsed it over to the barrel. Could I have inadvertently tossed my keys along with it? My sixty-five-year-old brain is still sharp as a razor, but it has seen a lot of shaves and developed plenty of burrs. It’s fully capable of doing something dumb. Then again, it has been inspiring dumb deeds all my life, such as eating poison ivy at eight years old, so I can’t lean too heavily on the age theory. It’s my brain, and it just does what it does. Now, where was I?
Oh, yeah . . . the trash barrel. There it sat across the parking lot, looking the very soul of innocence, which is pretty much what you’d expect from a trash barrel. Hastings has these weird-looking things that resemble robots wearing coolie hats, depending on how much you’ve had to drink. The hat makes it impossible to just peer inside the barrel, and you can’t remove it. Only a Certified Trash Barrel Hat Remover can do that. So you’ve got only two options. One is to reach in there and kind of feeeel your way around till, hopefully, you find what you’re looking for. The other option is not to. Just say screw it, walk away, and spare yourself the disgust. That would be the commonsense thing to do.
I can tell you, your hand comes across some mighty interesting objects, rooting around blindly in a public waste receptacle. That there, for instance–I’m pretty sure it’s part of a hamburger in a McDonald’s bag. And that . . . yes, that’ll be a nice, compactly wrapped, thoroughly piss-soaked diaper. Paper cups, bags, greasy paper plates, limp French fries, and oh yeah, there’s the catsup . . . ugh, this is nasty! . . . do you need more details? No? I thought not. The one thing there isn’t–or wasn’t, because I’m shifting tenses again–was keys.
I headed back to my car, climbed in, opened the bottle of 70 percent alcohol I carry in my console, and thoroughly drenched my hands. Time to give up the search. I stuck my spare key in the ignition, swung my legs inside the vehicle, and shut the door. And heard the faint clack of metal on metal.
Don’t tell me. Just don’t tell me . . . I opened the car door and peered outside.
My keys were dangling from the lock.
Thank you, sixty-five-year-old brain. You have filled my otherwise nondescript evening with so much unsought entertainment.
So now you know why it is paramount that I wash my hands with exceeding zeal and follow up with an alcohol rinse. It’s because I was looking for my keys.