November 3, 2017
Dear Everyone:
Last Sunday, just as I was about to go out shopping, my phone rang.
It was “Jeannie”. She
had accidentally locked her keys inside her car.
Naturally, I had an extra key to her car, as well as one to her
home.
Since I was heading out anyway, it was a simple matter to drive up to
the antique store in
Walnut Creek, where she was waiting.
Afterwards, she bought me lunch.
Luckily, I didn’t have anything really important to do that day,
other than the usual weekend chores, like laundry and cleaning.
We’ve all done it at least once, haven’t we?
Left the key in the car, or in the purse, which is in the car.
Let the door shut just as you realize, “Oh, no!”
When our parents were living in
Canby, Oregon, they were constantly
having to call each other to come and unlock the car at the
golf course,
or the grocery store, or at the roadside fruit stand.
It happens to everyone at some point or another.
Keys. Can’t live with them.
Can’t live without them.
Way back when we were living in
Lake Oswego, Oregon, we (almost) never
locked the doors to the house.
With seven kids, that would be a heck of a lot of keys to lose.
And lose them we would.
Count on it.
Truth be told, we lived in a very safe neighborhood.
Hardly anyone routinely locked their doors.
As far as I know, the only theft that ever occurred at our house
was a case of beer that disappeared from the (unlocked) garage one time.
Frankly, there was always the possibility that it was an “inside
job”. No accusations, of
course.
The problem with locking doors, of course, was not having a key to
unlock said door when necessary.
One time, when I lived in my first
condominium in
Concord, I
accidentally locked myself out while taking out the garbage.
Oops.
I went to a neighbor and used her phone to call “Jeannie”, who lived
about two miles away and had a key to my place.
Unfortunately, “Jeannie” wasn’t home.
Multiple messages on her phone machine later, I realized that my
patio door was open, if I could just borrow a ladder from the neighbor
to (literally) climb over the six-foot-high fence to get onto the patio.
The screen door was locked from the inside.
But I had some tools stored on the patio, including a pair of
plant shears the I used to snip a small slot in the screen next to the
locking mechanism. That
enabled me to slip my fingers through the screen, maneuver the lock and
get inside. Just in time to
hear “Jeannie” leaving a message on my phone machine, announcing that
she was home and wondering what all those messages about being locked
out were about.
Needless to say, I vowed never to let something like to happen again.
I needed to have a “backup key” somewhere that I could use in an
emergency.
Lots of people have an emergency key somewhere.
Some people leave a set of keys with a trusted neighbor.
A co-worker once told me about calling her neighbor for the
umpteenth time to come and unlock her door for her.
The neighbor’s child came over, on his skateboard, swinging the
set of keys all along the way.
“Jeannie” once stopped by a friend’s home to visit him.
Finding the door locked, she felt along the top of the doorframe,
pulled down the key, unlocked the door and made herself at home.
When the friend asked how she got in, she told him, “I just used
the extra key on top of the doorframe.”
To which he replied:
“What key?”
This is one reason why I always change the locks whenever I move into a
new-to-me home.
Of course, I have a key to “Jeannie”’s place and car, and vice versa.
After all, we live less than an hour from each other now.
But having a key closer to home is always preferable.
A few years ago, while looking for something else entirely (of course),
I discovered a
lockbox at one of the Really Big Office Supply Warehouse
Stores. The idea was that,
if you had a small business that employed a
janitor service that came
after hours, instead of giving them a key to your office, you could
place a key inside the box, then give the janitor the combination to the
lock. The box fit right over
the door handle. When the
janitor changed, instead of getting the key back, all you had to do was
change the combination.
So now there is a lockbox right on the front of my door.
There is even a label on the side, notifying whomever that the
combination is the last four digits of the phone number we had when we
lived in Lake Oswego, Oregon, in our unlocked house.
Any member of the family can easily enter with the key as long as
they can remember “NEptune-6-XXXX”.
Love, as always,
Pete
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