While I was growing up, my father had so little fashion sense that he often came downstairs on Saturday morning wearing a combination of items that hurt my teenaged eyes.  “Dad,” I screeched, “you can’t wear stripes with plaids!”  He looked down at his outfit and back up at me with little-boy innocence and a kooky smile.  “Who says?” he replied.

But on holidays, or evenings when he went to Bar Association dinners, he practically glowed when he wore a fresh close shave, a crisp white shirt and a dark blue suit that fit him perfectly.  Keeping his striped or dotted tie behaved, a gold charm dangled from two triangling chains in a style of clasp I never saw on any other man. Etched into the gold pendant were three not-quite-English capital letters along with a pointing finger and three stars.  Besides this resplendent tie minder, his jewelry collection consisted of a double-ridged gold wedding band that he never took off and a no-brand leather-band watch.

By the time I graduated high school, I understood that his classy tie fob sported Greek letters: Phi Beta Kappa, signifying an academic honor he’d earned at Yale.  I don’t think he wore it to telegraph his smarts.  He and my mother weren’t snobs or showoffs.  Probably he acquired it when he was voted into the society, and afterwards, rubbing it shiny when needed, he wouldn’t need to buy another tie clasp ever.

When my father died at age 65, my brother inherited Dad’s watch.  My mother carefully put away his wedding ring. My sister called dibs on the rolltop desk at which our father paid bills and made investments that, he ruefully confessed, always seemed to tank after he bought in.  I requested his Phi Beta Kappa “key” – a strange name for the tie-clasp medallion.  Its shape resembled a slateboard with pointy knobs above and below rather than something to unlock a door.  No one in the family objected.

Unexpectedly, I had a golden key of my own by then.  At Brown I went all in on the option to take no grades, despite warnings that this would muck up my future.  Education was its own reward, I felt, as I explored subjects as diverse as geology, art history, math and advanced French.  Senior year my housemate Craig, who’d been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, came back from a meeting of the group and announced “Congratulations, Marcia!  You were voted in today, the only one elected who had no grades.”    

I never learned who nominated me.  A professor?  One of my fellow philosophy majors?  According to Craig, a heated discussion erupted over whether someone with no grades should receive an academic award.  I paid $30 or $35 for my key, as I recall, even though there was no obvious way for me to wear it.  Not for me dress-up suits and ties, of course, but I also had no truck with necklaces, earrings, bracelets or brooches, either then or later.

All the same, this echoed object accented the way I, more than anyone else in our extended family, took after my father.  In college, Dad aspired to become an economics professor.  Advised that ethnic prejudice would thwart that calling, he went to law school instead.  Wrestling there with concepts like justice, intent and fault, he again floated to the top layer of his class.  In college and graduate school, my revered abstractions, not far from his, were truth, knowledge and relentless inquiry.  We shared a temperament, too:  subdued, thoughtful, curious and unlikely to be chosen Mr. or Miss Popularity.

Over the years, I’ve lost this precious pair of keys, found them and lost them again.  Not lost as in letting them go completely out of my possession but lost as in having no clue where I put them. 

The other day I searched my basement and my bedroom, frustrated that I’d sought to have the keys as keepsakes and then failed at keeping them.  No, they weren’t in the mothball-scented chest that housed a gray and blue afghan crocheted by my grandmother, nor in the bin with a vintage Hudson Bay blanket now worth hundreds of dollars.  No, they weren’t in the drawer with the scratchy wool socks I used to wear to cushion my one-size-bigger hiking boots. 

Yet did it matter?  I sighed.  Even if I’d inadvertently tossed the keys, didn’t I still have them safely stored in the best kind of vault – my core identity?  Reverence for the liberal arts, says Phi Beta Kappa: check.  Reverence for my father: double check.  Accomplishments: No one can take those away from me or Dad. 

I stopped rummaging and relaxed.  Who says I need to hold mementos in my palm to feel I have them?  In my father’s words, who says? 

– Marcia Yudkin