When Brother Dave returned to Charlotte from a trip to Snowbird, in the mountains of North Carolina, he unloaded his generator and some other equipment right away, including a step ladder he needed to change a light bulb in the kitchen.
And then, he told me, he sat down and watched some football on TV.
“There were still a couple of things on the truck so, at half time, I went out to put the rest of the stuff in the storage shed behind my house.”
While Dave was cleaning out his truck his wife, Kathy, who had Alzheimer’s, closed the back door.
Unfortunately, the lock was on. Fortunately Dave almost always carried his keys in his right front pocket. But, unfortunately, not this time.
“This time I did not have my keys but I almost welcomed the opportunity to use the key that Edith, my sister-in-law, had convinced me to keep in my wallet.”
But Dave’s wallet was in the house, too.
“This was going to be embarrassing because I was going to have to call Edith and ask her to come over and unlock the door. I’d had to do that about a month ago — that’s when she suggested I get a spare key. But, turns out, I couldn’t call her. My cell phone was in the house.”
There had to be a way in, and then Dave remembered.
“Kathy had tried to climb out one of the windows on the front of the house which meant I could climb in that window.”
But that didn’t work either. Kathy had gotten the window open but hadn’t figured out how to open the storm window, and Dave couldn’t raise it from the outside.
But there were lots of other windows and he figured one of them was bound to be unlocked. He was right.
“The very next window I checked was also unlocked and I was able to raise the storm window.”
The window was unlocked but it was stuck or something; he couldn’t raise it. He got a crowbar from the storage shed but he couldn’t pry it open. Someone had burglar-proofed it by drilling a hole through both windows, where they came together in the middle, and sticking a nail in the hole.
Of course, Brother Dave was not about to give up.
“I remembered a window in my computer room that had been broken for years. That storm window would not raise either so I got a screw driver from the shed and began removing the screws that held it in place. Some of the screw were on top, a little too high for me to reach –I would need the small step ladder from my truck.”
When he went to his truck to get the ladder he remembered that he had already taken it in the house to change a light bulb. So he improvised. He saw a cooler that he had taken to Snowbird — if he stood on the cooler he could reach the top screws.
Dave, who was 76, told me, “Fortunately I did not break anything in the little tumble I took the first time I tried to climb on top of the cooler. The second time worked like a charm.”
He removed the storm window, wiggled the broken glass out of the window, stuck his hand through the hole,and unlocked the window.
“I was able to raise the window and start to crawl in about the same time some neighbors were walking up the street. I saw them give me a puzzled look and go for their phone. I was able to extract myself quickly enough to say howdy and explain a little of what was going on.”
And then he crawled into his house.
So what does this prove? It proves, once again, the validity of a rule I adopted years ago: “If you’re gonna be dumb, you got to be tough.”
Coming Friday: Miss Mattie