The Key

I paused twenty minutes into my walk around Lake Como on a late autumn day. I opened the kleenix package, and a bright silver key dropped on the walkway. The p-i-n-g of silver against concrete was a musical sound, brief but bright and pure. What made that a sound of music? Was it the key, the concrete, my imagination, or was it a harmony of all three factors? And the key itself - how did it come to be stuffed in a collection? Was it chance or design? I was standing beside and beneath one of the cottonwoods in which pairs of eagles sometimes perch, perhaps more often than we witness. People like me stop and stare intently on that highest branch, on which they brood, without a sound or gesture. Are they as stunned as we are? But no eagle perching or flying distracted my thoughts. How does such a small event as the dropped key loom so large in my mind that it displaces eagles and its sound equals a melody by Mahler? This setting is a promenade around the lake on a leisurely Sunday afternoon on a warm autumn day. Perhaps it deserves music by Ravel in his andante disposition to accompany the walkers. Suddenly, four young women, all of them pushing a baby carriage, sweep past me in a flurry of talk about graduation, first nursing job, boyfriends, all this compressed in the time it takes them to rush past me and disappear over a small hill. These are confident, successful, untroubled young adults, firmly grasping their present duties and future possibilities, needing no magical intervention. Oh, how their frivolity belied the genuine reality of the moment as I saw it. How their future-driven lives surpassed the four people in their care, four retarded adults, whose crushed minds confined them to baby carriages. Perhaps my key will unlock whatever confines them body and soul and leaves them unfree in a world of increasing freedoms. And they may join the frivolity of youth instead premature dotage. Is this a worthy use of whatever magic imbues my key, if magic there can be in such common place things we stumble upon in the sight of eagles.