I had just arrived home from work late one night when I received a call from Jared, a new neighbor. “Daris, do you have a long ladder?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Could you bring it over as fast as you can? My youngest has locked herself in her bedroom, and we can’t open the door.”
My wife chose to join me to get to know them better. I loaded the ladder on my small pickup, strapped it down, and we were on our way.
It was only about a mile to our neighbor’s house, so we soon pulled into his driveway. Jared was visiting with a deputy sheriff. The deputy headed into the house, and Jared came to visit. “We may not need the ladder,” he said. “When I called you, my wife called 911. The deputy said he hasn’t ever found a lock he can’t pick.”
We entered the house and arrived at the bedroom door while the deputy was examining the lock. From the other side, the wailing of Jared’s three-year-old daughter could be heard at about the same decibel level as that of a fire engine.
“Well, what do you think?” Jared asked the deputy.
The deputy considered the lock carefully. The house that Jared and his family rented was built in the early part of the 1900s. The lock was an original from that era.
The deputy turned to Jared. “When I told you I had never found a lock I couldn’t pick, there was one exception. It was a lock just like this one.”
The deputy left, and while my wife visited with Jared’s wife, the older siblings tried to console their sister through the door. Meanwhile, Jared and I headed outside, unloaded the ladder, and set it up against the side of the house.
“Is the window unlocked?” I asked Jared.
He shrugged. “Since it’s summer, and the house has no air conditioning, there’s a good chance it has been opened today and not relatched.”
Jared climbed to the window. He pulled the screen and dropped it to me. He then tried to open the window but had no luck. Meanwhile, a little tear-stained face appeared at the window, and the crying increased.
“The window is unlatched,” Jared said, “but I can’t find a place to get a grasp on it.”
“Could you work a screwdriver in along the edge to pry it open?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Jared said. “But all my tools are still packed away from our move.”
I always had a few tools in my pickup, so I retrieved one. He took it up and carefully worked it in along the side. It took just a bit, but within a few minutes, he slid the window open.
His daughter was so anxious that she almost threw herself at him. He nearly lost his balance, but I grabbed the ladder and held it steady. He pushed his daughter back inside, then squeezed through the window.
I hurried upstairs and was there by the time he opened the door. Jared had tried to wrap a sweater around her. She had just come out of the bath when she had locked the door. That might have also added to her feelings of insecurity.
When the door opened, everyone was relieved that she was okay. When her eyes rested on me, suddenly she shook her finger at me, saying, “No! No! No!” She then said some three-year-old things I didn’t understand.
Jared shook his head. “No, sweetheart. Mr. Howard didn’t lock you in there. You did when you turned the latch on the door. He came to help you.”
But she would have none of it. For most of a year, when she saw me at church or a community social, she would scream and run to her parents. Jared always apologized.
I laughed. “What do you expect when you open the door, and a strange-looking person is standing there? And there is no one stranger-looking than me.”
