Keys

Yesterday I went to Notting Hill to check out the famous street fair that takes place there every Saturday.  The streets were packed with people of every nationality, and there were countless stores and stalls selling every kind of antique.  I went up to this one stall to inquire about a particular key that caught my eye.  It was amazing.  It had these ornate swirls at the top, and was only about three inches in length and the kind of metal that reminds you that it has been places.  When I asked the man behind the counter what it's price was, he smiled and said, "Well it's a bit more expensive then your average key."  At this point he started telling me about the key, and pointing out characteristics that my untrained eye had missed altogether.  He finally told me that this particular key was priced at about two hundred and fifty pounds.  At this I laughed and admitted that that was just a bit out of my price range.  Now at this point, he could have stopped talking to me.  Realizing that he definitely wasn't going to make a sale, he could have just told me to have a nice day and I would have left.  But instead, he started pulling out all of his most valuable keys, and telling me about them.  He showed me a medieval key that someone had found preserved in the mud of the Thames.  An elaborate French key that probably belonged to a church.  He told me the difference between just an old key, and a skeleton key and what they were each used for.  This man, whose name is Lane, spent at least fifteen minutes just giving me information for no other reason than that he knew that I was interested.  Once he had shown me all of his best treasures, I picked up the little key which had first drawn my attention, and which I now knew was an Italian made key from sometime in the late 1600's, and looked at is carefully one more time.  When I set it down he said to me, "Ah yes.  I completely understand.  Keys are very provocative, especially when you have no way of knowing what it is they were made to open."  I simply nodded, asked if he was there every weekend, thanked him, and walked away holding his card in my hand.  It was just one of those chance encounters that I'll never forget.  He wasn't particularly handsome, or charismatic.  He was just a lovely man who saw how interested this young girl was in something that he was interested in too.  As I walked back down the street towards the subway station, I swore that if I happen to have two hundred and fifty extra pounds by the end of my trip, I'm going back for that key.  Even though it's unlikely that it will ever belong to me, I will never forget that little Italian key that opens something mysterious, and how a man named Lane completely understood, and was able to put into words, what it is that I have always loved about keys.