Unfamiliar Key Examined Again, Put Back In Drawer

“What if it’s important?”

Jerusalem, May 28 – The head of a local household repeated a ritual today that he performs every six to eight months, eyewitnesses reported, involving a key that resides in a kitchen storage unit alongside a random assortment of other objects: he took the key out of the unit, turned it in his hand several times, scratched his head, and, with visible hesitation, returned it to its former place.

Uzziel Farkash, 50, decided to include in a recent cleanup effort a reorganization of the kitchen drawer that holds batteries, pens, key fobs, silicone bracelets, parts of a bicycle pump, out-of-order flashlights, shelf brackets, rubber bands, paper clips, single shoelaces, and some pieces of twine, among other household detritus that accumulates there for want of more suitable places to put items that someone will probably need in the medium term, but certainly not right now, and would only get lost if placed somewhere else. Farkash began by testing the batteries and setting aside the dead ones for recycling, while restoring the usable ones to the drawer. Then he picked up the key and stared at it.

“Honey,” he called to Mrs. Farkash, “do you know what this key is for?”

“Which one?”

“The gold-colored one in the random drawer,” he answered.

“You ask me that at least twice a year,” she responded. “It’s been eight years. Throw it out.”

“But what if it’s important?”

“It’s not important if we haven’t needed it in at least eight years!”

He hesitated, then put the key in the back of the drawer again.

Uzziel, father of five and husband to Shoham, elected to tackle the detritus drawer as the couple and their children labored to reassemble their home after a weeklong paint job that upended normal living arrangements and necessitated, in its wake, a bout of cleaning and downsizing in an attempt to bring greater efficiency and convenience to the family. Uzziel told a reporter that his focus on the drawer stemmed from his sense that the rooms that saw repainting were getting a thorough reorganization, but the kitchen, which required only light touch-ups, would get no such treatment.

“We’re going to do this right, I told myself,” he recalled. He paused.

“D’you think it’s from the padlock we kept on the makeshift gate that closed the place off before we installed a proper front door when we built the house?” he wondered.

“Better hold on to it,” he decided. “We might find that padlock someday.”

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