My two grown children say I am unnecessarily cautious and go into too much detail. For example, I emailed them about my painstaking efforts to create a vegetation-free perimeter around my country home as a precaution against wildfires. They mocked me for my precaution, given the supposedly low risk of wildfires in the region, and for including “more than anyone would want to know” about the project. The detail, I responded, was meant to reassure them their inheritance was being safeguarded, and would be useful when they owned the place and needed to redeploy those protective measures against vegetation that undoubtedly would grow back. My alleged overcaution was not a big price to pay for the peace of mind gained from minimizing the risk of suffering one of the consequences of civilization’s sins, responsibility for which, I supposed, we all share.
I had bought the house five years ago, shortly after their mother had left me. As part of the divorce settlement, she bought out my interest in the family home, and I used the money to make downpayments on the country house and a tiny apartment in town. My children, who were then in college, had no interest in going to the house, and preferred to fritter away their free time seeing friends or traveling, likely courting all sorts of trouble and illegality whose worst outcomes they were fortunate to evade. They rebuffed my invitations to spend even a weekend at the house, though they claimed I hadn’t tried hard enough to accommodate their schedules.
Now out of college and working, my children became more interested in bringing friends to the house, but only if I wasn’t there. They asked me to leave an extra set of keys. When I texted them information about where I had hidden the extra set, once again they made fun of my precautions and detailed instructions.
They failed to see that the task was both important and inherently subtle: choosing a place that the wrong person is unlikely to discover but that the right person can find and access, with an appropriate, but not insuperable, amount of effort. They claimed that the risk of burglary at a country house was minimal, and that there’s likely little of value to be stolen in any case. “You should have just left them under the door mat or a flower pot, like everybody else,” my daughter said. My elaborate measures, she suggested, were an affectation, some sort of unhealthy obsession, or even an act of self-aggrandizement. But is it wrong to take pleasure in designing and implementing a thoughtful process rather than being satisfied with the slapdash execution of a task?
In any case, their criticisms were misplaced. The first time one of them – my son – came to use the house, I realized I wasn’t nearly as careful as I should have been in hiding the extra set of keys. I had placed them underneath a carpet of pine needles, over which I placed a blanket of stones, all of which sat on top of a large, three-foot high, relatively flat-top rock, and set like the cynosure of a small grove of pine trees next to the house. I chose the location to help me remember where I hid the keys, as the stones had a significance known only to me. Over time I had collected and then arrayed them on the rock’s surface, creating a kind of scrapbook for myself; there was something about most every stone, be it texture, color, or shape, that suggested a memory of a time or place, or even just a vague ambience, that should be salvaged.
This scrapbook of stones turned out not to be a good place for achieving the twin goals of hiding the keys and making them accessible. There had been a big snowfall shortly before my son came to use the house for the very first time, when he brought some friends for a ski trip. In clearing the snow off the rock, he ended up brushing the keys into the yard, where they drifted downward into the snow, like angels falling through a sky full of clouds. Despite the search efforts of him and his friends – or because of those efforts, which likely ensured that the object of the search would be further obscured – the keys would not be found until spring.
All nearby lodging was fully booked except for an expensive chalet that they couldn’t afford. My son had argued that my “overdetermined hiding place” made me responsible for the lost keys, and he tried to get me to give my credit card to the chalet, but I refused. I was tempted to point out that he was wrong to reproach me for being overly cautious in hiding the keys when, in fact, I should have taken more care. But that would only have angered him further. I simply said that hadn’t bought this vacation house so that I could pay for a fancy lodging nearby. Nor would I allow him to damage a window so he could break into the house. The ski weekend was aborted and the group had to come back home. I imagined my son, in his rage at not being able to get into the house, sweeping the stones off the rock in every direction, or perhaps flinging some viciously, as if to pummel me with them, while his friends looked on with a mixture of embarrassment and irritation.
Mindful of this unpleasant experience, I subsequently re-concealed the keys with more care. I sent my children a text with all the details of those more conscientious efforts. I used the large flat rock again, but this time only as a platform for someone to stand on and reach the hiding place. Some years before I had a found a hunter’s decoy of a goose. As the occasion for a little joke, I had wedged the bird in the crook between a branch and the trunk of the pine tree that extended over the rock. The goose had a hole in its hind end, where its anus might have been. I supposed that this hole was where the hunter would insert a rod to mount the decoy in the field, and attract other geese. Inside the hole was a little metal hook where, presumably, one attached the mounting device. This was a perfect apparatus for attaching the keys inside the hole. As I explained in the instructions to my children, I did not merely slip the key ring over the hook, lest it slip off and possibly create a repeat of the snow-swallowed keys. Instead, I used a twist tie to fasten the key ring tightly to the hook. I did not use just any twist tie, like the kind you might use to tie up a bag of sliced bread or a small garbage bag. I used a longer, thicker, reinforced black tie, with almost the tensile strength of a wire. Because of its strength it was not that easy to manipulate, and in clasping the key ring to the hook, I actually cut my finger in the process. It was if the cut and the blood were proof of the seriousness of my efforts.
After I texted the new instructions for retrieving the keys to my children, I woke up that night around 2 AM, worried that texting might have been a mistake. What if my phone, or theirs, got hacked, and the instructions became available to persons with ill intent? The hacker could have located the property by searching my name in the town tax records, which are publicly available.
It is, of course, quite unpleasant to awake in the middle of the night and think that something you did to be safe actually might create more danger, and needs to be fixed at once. Not having fully descended from a dream, besieged by random remnants of stored-up thoughts, it is easy to feel fear and even despair. You can’t think things through rationally, and leap to consideration of extreme and probably useless remedial measures.
Of course, I told myself, when I am fully awake the next morning, I will conclude that my fears were, if not unfounded, at least overdrawn, and I will be rankled at having wasted my sleeplessness, which, if it had to occur, at least could have been put to better use in a new project. Yet I couldn’t help myself from getting out of bed, printing and then deleting the text with the instructions on how to find the keys, and texting my children to do the same.
My worries were not assuaged even after these actions. Before getting back to sleep, I wondered whether it might be difficult to unfasten the keys, especially if it were cold, because of the stiff, strong twist tie I used. The person trying to free the keys might get frustrated and try to rip or violently jerk the twist tie, thereby possibly loosening the keys and send them flying off into the ground littered with leaves, or perhaps even into snow, and we’d be back where we were when my son and his friends came for the ski trip.
Well, if that happened and they couldn’t get into the house, so be it; that would be what they deserved for their rough impatience. But then a new, more worrisome thought seeped into my mind. What would I feel like if, say, I forgot my own keys when I came to the house, and had to retrieve the extra set? When I mounted the rock, might I feel as if I were standing on a scaffold awaiting execution? As I reached upward to grab the bird to begin the process of retrieving the keys, might I think of a condemned person who managed to free his hands tied behind his back and then reached up to grab the rope from which he was hanging, to relieve the strangulation of his neck, only to lack the strength to sustain his hold on the rope? Eventually he would succumb, but not before a flashing thought that maybe the executioner had been instructed to deliberately tie his hands loosely, so that the condemned man would try to save himself, only to prolong his suffering and deepen the horror of his death as he realized, just before he expired, that the initial thrill and then dashed hope of salvation was likely a premeditated part of the punishment. Might this experience cause me to forget all about retrieving the extra set of keys, or at least cause me to lose interest in retrieving them, and instead to return to the city and forego the weekend I had planned to spend at the house?
Of course, thoughts like these never would occur to either of my children, whose single-minded purpose would be to get into my house and no doubt engage in some sort of debauchery with friends. But even they might get diverted, at least momentarily, from their goal of retrieving the keys when standing on the rock. They might feel like a preacher installed in the pulpit, preparing to preach to the congregation. Yes, a person there might well bleed into that role, castigating others for their sins, issuing dire warnings of the consequences of not promptly repenting, if indeed it was not already too late to do so. I could see my censorious son imagining himself in this way.
But perhaps my children lacked the imagination even for this thought. The next day I mailed them hard copies of the new instructions to find the keys, with a request to be careful with them, and a reminder to delete any texts with either the old or new instructions.
Of course, my efforts were met with their withering disdain. Fine, feel entitled, and fail to appreciate the steps I’ve taken to make sure that the keys won’t be misappropriated, to say nothing of my efforts to wildfire-proof the house which you want to use, and which, though you did not pay for it, you will inherit someday, probably none too soon for your tastes.
Perhaps instead of a twist tie, I should have used a zip tie, which would have been virtually impossible for them to release in order to access the keys. Sorry, I would tell them when, incredulous at such a measure, they complained – I must not have been focused on the fact that a zip tie wasn’t meant to be undone. I was thinking too much about the best way to make sure the keys wouldn’t fall down and get lost. Or maybe, I would tell them, subconsciously I had a semantic confusion between, on the one hand, the idea of hiding something that’s meant to be found, such as in a child’s game of hide and seek, and, on the other hand, sequestering the object, with the connotation that it cannot be accessed, at least not without being ransomed.
After all, maybe using the zip tie and preventing them from getting into the house would have made them think harder about whether they weren’t, in the end, somewhat equivocal about the prospect of having access to the keys. Would it really admit them to a long week of pleasure, as if it were a sort of temporary paradise, or would it trap them in some pageant of purposelessness, whose blandness would quickly become stale?
Then, for a second time, I thought about what it would be like if I had gone there and forgotten my own keys. If it were during the balmy summer, rather than feeling like a condemned man, might I nonetheless again lose focus on retrieving the keys and getting into the house, and instead lie down on the flat, worn surface of the rock, surrounded by the scrapbook of stones I had recreated and reassembled as best I could, stones now slung in a circle around the perimeter of the rock’s surface? Would I lie there in the warmth of the rock and the sun that heats the rock, as if I were a surgical patient, eagerly awaiting the momentary flush of tranquility from the anesthesia, just before the onset of peaceful oblivion?
After I had given them the new instructions for finding the keys, neither child asked me to use the house. On my next visit there, almost a month later, I discovered to my shock that someone apparently had broken in through a smashed window. When I peered through the hole in the window, nothing inside appeared to have been disturbed, though of course a more thorough search would be required. I couldn’t help but think that whoever broke the window might just have been delivering a hostile message, summing up the rancor of many people, starting with my ex-wife, extending to my children, and spreading outwards to reflect the enmity of others, half-remembered or even unknown, towards me.
Had one of my children gone to the house without informing me? Perhaps one of them had forgotten the instructions for the keys and had broken into the house. Although the circle of stones on the rock seemed intact, I texted them, casually asking if they had been there, and if so, had they noticed anything.
My daughter simply texted “Of course not.” No response from my son.
I then texted that they were always welcome to use the house.
My son texted: “I don’t know that I’ll ever go there.” Still angry about the ski trip I supposed.
I asked if they still had the instructions for the extra set of keys.
Then my son: “Uh oh! Old man forgot his keys and then forgot where he hid the extra set? Or maybe the bird flew away with them.”
“Very funny.”
“Maybe you’re the one that broke in,” my son texted back. Then: “Has anyone but you ever been inside that house? Have you ever been inside?”
“Free the keys! They shall be risen,” texted my daughter, with a string of emojis I couldn’t decipher.
I asked again if they still had the instructions.
“Too many details!” my daughter texted.
“The devil is in them,” I replied.
*****
Jess Fardella is a retired lawyer and is now working with nonprofits in the areas of food insecurity and health care. In addition to writing fiction, he is a fan of Hispanic language, literature and culture, including Latin dance, and plays and composes for jazz piano.
