Earlier I described the places I’ve lived in my life, including a few years when my family was in St. Paul. It was during the Coleman era, and things were pretty cool. Our neighborhood there was pretty quiet, but we didn’t take things for granted. Allow me to describe a couple of the wild times we experienced in the big city.
A couple of months after we moved in I went down to West St. Paul one for a meeting with some guys I knew. It was a bitterly cold, snowy, slushy February night and my wife, then 8 1/2 months pregnant with our second child, stayed home to read and to put the oldest child to bed. About halfway through my meeting the waitress at the restaurant I was at came and said I had a phone call (we were poor and didn’t have a cell phone then). The guys and I all said, “uh-oh,” thinking that my wife might be in labor.
It was my wife on the phone, all right, but she needed to tell me that she thought she had heard someone kick our back door. Brave soul that she is, she had gone through the house, double-checked the locks and looked out the windows but hadn’t seen any footprints in the fresh now. She had just gotten through telling me that everything was okay but that she’d appreciate it if I didn’t dawdle in coming home, when suddenly there was another loud noise from the back door. “There it is again!” she said. “I’m calling 911!” and she hung up.
I hustled back to the table and gave a quick description of what was going on while I yanked my coat on, and then passed out orders. “Larry, follow me. Bryan, you call 911 just in case my wife’s call didn’t get completed. You other guys pray!”
It was normally a 10-minute drive from where I was to our house, but I made it in 8 despite the nasty weather, hitting my driveway in a power slide Tom Cruise would have been proud of. A police cruiser was already there and every light in and around the house was on, but I couldn’t see an officer. Not knowing if some miscreant might still make a break for it I grabbed the only weapon I had in the car as I approached the house: a long-handled ice scraper (hey, it had some pointy corners on it, and a nasty edge!). Everything was under control, however, and the policeman had already been through the house and around it without finding anything or seeing footprints. He stayed a few minutes more and after he left my wife and I and Larry, who had indeed followed me, sat around the kitchen table while my wife recovered from a delayed case of the shakes.
She’d kept her wits about her so far, even pondering where best to position herself to protect our sleeping daughter and if our cat would be a good weapon if she threw it at an intruder’s face, but now that the adrenaline was seeping away she had to regather herself. The three of us talked about how weird the situation was, but we couldn’t figure out what caused the noises. Finally Larry got up to leave and walked to the back door. He opened the inside door. He reached for the storm door.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “I know what happened.”
We went over to the door and we could see that the hydraulic arm that closed the storm door was hanging loosely from the frame. For some reason, perhaps the intense cold, one of the bolts holding the front portion of the arm to the storm door had given way; that was probably the first noise my wife had heard. Shortly thereafter the second bolt had given way, causing the arm to break free and give the wooden door a good thump. Crisis over, I returned my ice scraper to the car while laughing at the idea of a home-defense cat.
A year or two later on a summer Sunday morning about 4:00 a.m. we were awakened by the alarm from our neighbor’s garage, the sound of feet pounding down his driveway outside our bedroom window and the chirp of tires and a roaring engine in a get-away. Our house had a detached garage and faced so that we couldn’t tell from the house whether or not the overhead garage door was closed. There were a few times when this chore was overlooked.
With crimes afoot in the early morning hours I couldn’t remember if I had checked on the door the night before. Not wanting to wait to find out if anyone had gotten into the garage I got out of bed, pulled on some jeans and grabbed my new home defense system – a bright red, 28-ounce baseball bat with a Dairy Queen logo on it that I’d gotten when working for the Twins. The coast was probably clear, but why take a chance?
I alertly made my way across the backyard to the garage and gently turned the handle on the side door. Carp! It was unlocked! I paused. If someone had gotten into the garage, and if the big door was closed, I might soon be facing a young, hyper interloper. I decided I’d swing the door open with my left hand and in the same motion reach up and push the button to open the overhead if necessary, giving anyone inside a clear path to escape that didn’t necessarily have to run through me. Just in case, the red bat was cocked in my right hand.
There was nobody there.
Later in the morning I encountered my neighbor. “A little excitement this morning, huh?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “The really weird thing is I looked out my window and I saw someone who was clearly up to no good in your backyard and, I swear, he was holding what looked like a red baseball bat!”
I gave him my best Clint Eastwood squint, and made some comment about him hiding in his bed, adding, “a man’s got to know his limitations.”
Now, I’m not going to say how our home security has evolved in the time since then, but if anyone’s thinking of testing our defenses all I can advise is that you be ready for anything, including being rendered helpless by uncontrollable laughter.
