Work badge out of purse and *firmly* in hand. Check.
Personal laptop, phone charger, and purse into personal laptop bag. Check.
Work laptop over shoulder. Check.
Sandals on. Check.
Frog-infested lunch bag over arm. Check.
Pick up personal laptop bag. Check.
Lock door and shut it. Check.

Errrr….. Something was not right! I was outside the locked door without keys to either the landfill or the Ninja. With all of my work paraphernalia dangling off my body. Well, whew! Mouse is home. I can just wake her the nitroglycerin up and she can let me in so I can grab my keys. But Mouse is not *always* home. In fact, she has just spent the last four years in college over at kzoo and six months of that in Africa! She is here for the time being but she won’t be here forever. So I really need to be more careful when I go through my going-to-work mental checklist. Because if I do lock myself out, I might have to figger a way to break in and then somebody might call the po-leese and when they try to arrest me even after I’ve shown them my valid Great Lake State driver’s license with a picture that looks like me (sort of, but that’s a whole ‘nother story) and has the landfill address right on it, you can bet that I will be screaming bloody murder!

It’s a bit unlikely that anyone would call the po-leese on a baggy old honky like me. I do not exude the aura of criminal as hard as I may sometimes try and I think even most of the people in my neighborhood who don’t know me by name probably know me as “that old bag who walks every morning” or something like that. I am a fixture. A known entity. And anyway. In our nice but decidedly un-fancy neighborhood, there is somebody that I will refer to as the Duke of Maple Ridge who sees everything! He saw *both* trees fall on our house — one of them at three AM — and he was watching when the guy that got bored at a nearby AA meeting came down the street trying unlocked house and vee-hickle doors. I think the only incident that he didn’t witness first-hand is when the catty-corner neighbor became suicidal and barricaded himself behind a gun and the po-leese locked down the neighborhood. The Duke missed a good one that time. He was out of town and his wife was home alone when the local SWAT team appeared in their back yard demanding all kinds of stuff. Ladders or whatever, I forget. I make a decent gin ‘n’ tonic and she was okay by the end of that episode. Anyway, I would just about bet that if the Duke saw me struggling with my front door, he’d be over here helping out. An adventure!

But maybe not. What if someone who didn’t know that an old bag and grumper lived at the landfill just caught a glimpse of a door being bashed in and didn’t see who did it? I don’t know about this Gates incident over there at Harvard or wherever it happened. I don’t have all the facts. The more I read and hear about it, the more questions I have. He said, she said, he said. Defuse, people! If we knew our neighbors a bit better, maybe this stuff wouldn’t happen. Maybe we could actually leave our doors unlocked? That’s probably too much to hope for. But there are always these issues of face. I mean saving face. If you ask somebody for their ID in their own house and everything matches up, then whoever called you was wrong. Apologize and back off. We are all coming from our own space and I know that even when I drive the five hours down from Da Yoop, sometimes I am pretty testy about things by the time I get home. Think about the person who has flown from China. How many hours? How many airports?

Breathe,
Kayak Woman of Maple Ridge

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