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I should have taken his advice years before this. A very conscientious physician, after evaluating a pain in my back, picked up my purse and immediately put it back down.
Well, there's part of your problem, he said. You are only aggravating your bulging disc by carrying that heavy bag around. And he was right. I carried a large handbag at the time. Not only did it contain a wallet (by no means filled with cash), there also was an assortment of makeup, handkerchiefs, an envelope filled with store coupons, hand sanitizer, pens, pencils, notebooks, a cell phone and my camera I was using for my job.
And then there were the keys. Lots of keys clanged around in the bottom of my handbag. Not too long ago, I pulled a large key ring filled with keys from my purse and placed it on the kitchen counter. I stared at the keys for a time trying to understand what purpose they served.
As I perused through the keys, I shouldn't have been surprised to see that I still had keys that opened doors to places I have lived throughout my life. From my childhood home, I managed to still have a key to the front door lock that no longer exists. Four locations later, I have an assortment of keys ranging from tiny, silver keys to hefty gold-colored keys.
The first key I owned fit into the lock of my girlhood diary. Another opened a jewelry box and later, another key unlocked a hope chest. Then it was a number of keys to two apartments and eventually our first home. Now in our forever home, still more keys unlock various doors.
In between the house keys you could find numerous car and truck keys. That was before those fancy key fobs were invented. We actually had to use keys to unlock our car doors and usually a separate key for the trunk of the vehicles.
I took each key off the ring and sorted them out on the counter. In the end, I had fewer keys in the keep pile than in the toss file. Yet, if I am like a lot of you, keys are never thrown away. They end up in a junk drawer waiting to be resurrected into service.
Some of the keys are colored coded and open doors to several of my siblings' homes. I am one of the designated siblings who holds onto their keys "just in case" others get locked out or I need to get into their homes in the event of an emergency.
But now there was a new twist to the keychains. I counted 14 of those plastic store cards in addition to a library card attached to my keychain. While they aren't very heavy, those cards can add some bulk to my purse.
So now I have consolidated fewer keys and cards onto one keychain. It is more efficient and not as heavy this way. You would think that with all those keys I used to carry around, I would never lose them.
But I was always leaving my keys somewhere other than in the bottom of my purse. So there is now another addition to the keychain -- a simple little gadget that helps me find my keys via my cell phone. Now if I can only remember where I left my cell phone ...
Heather Ziegler can be reached via email at hziegler@theintelligencer.net.