Go Away!
There's a particular uneasy kind of feeling you get when you're woken at 2 AM by someone trying to get into your front door. You're not sure what the sounds really are at first. They're obviously coming from downstairs, so you creep down, pausing and tilting your head this way and that, until you reach the main floor and there's no longer any doubt where the sounds come from.
Our front door has three tall windows at head height. When my wife Betty and I got there, we were greeted by the strange sight of a man walking right into the door and bouncing his face off the windows. He didn't notice us even though we had turned the lights on, until Barbie started shouting through the closed door, "Go away! Go away!" and making pushing motions with her hands. When she yelled, "What do you want?" he answered, "I'm here."
I said nothing for a while because I wasn't entirely sure that this man was not my friend Dave. He kind of looked like him from the side. "Would Dave actually come here on a social visit, totally pissed, at 2 AM?", I thought. Could happen, maybe—but this wasn't Dave. I said, "You've got the wrong house, dude," hoping that my well-placed use of street slang would penetrate his drunkenness. He started apologizing profusely, and that was all right. He drifted carefully down the front steps, and we started heading back to bed.
I hung around in the living room with the lights off for a moment, just to make sure he was really off to find his real house. At the end of the walk, he turned around and put a foot up on the step, bending down to deal with some kind of shoe issue. I had a flash of deja vu and thought, "Oh my God, he hasn't lost his fucking shoe, has he?" See, this has happened to us before. A couple of years ago, at a different house, we were woken by someone ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night. We popped a window open and yelled "Hello!" and "What do you want?" The reply sounded like a 250-pound middle-aged drunk woman moaning that we had to let her in because she had lost her shoe.
I went downstairs and talked to her—she was a 100-pound college age drunk Commercial Drive chick—and managed to convince her that ours was not the house she'd spent the night partying in, and she should look for her shoe somewhere else. Weeks later we found the shoe in the garden.
In any case, the guy who was not Dave straightened up and staggered on his way eventually. Two thoughts occurred to me later. First: if he was going to mistake a house on the street for his, wouldn't it be more likely that he'd choose one of the many identical houses across the street, rather than the most distinctive house on the street (ours)? Also, why didn't the dog bark like she always does when people come to the door? Did she think the guy was Dave too?
Our front door has three tall windows at head height. When my wife Betty and I got there, we were greeted by the strange sight of a man walking right into the door and bouncing his face off the windows. He didn't notice us even though we had turned the lights on, until Barbie started shouting through the closed door, "Go away! Go away!" and making pushing motions with her hands. When she yelled, "What do you want?" he answered, "I'm here."
I said nothing for a while because I wasn't entirely sure that this man was not my friend Dave. He kind of looked like him from the side. "Would Dave actually come here on a social visit, totally pissed, at 2 AM?", I thought. Could happen, maybe—but this wasn't Dave. I said, "You've got the wrong house, dude," hoping that my well-placed use of street slang would penetrate his drunkenness. He started apologizing profusely, and that was all right. He drifted carefully down the front steps, and we started heading back to bed.
I hung around in the living room with the lights off for a moment, just to make sure he was really off to find his real house. At the end of the walk, he turned around and put a foot up on the step, bending down to deal with some kind of shoe issue. I had a flash of deja vu and thought, "Oh my God, he hasn't lost his fucking shoe, has he?" See, this has happened to us before. A couple of years ago, at a different house, we were woken by someone ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night. We popped a window open and yelled "Hello!" and "What do you want?" The reply sounded like a 250-pound middle-aged drunk woman moaning that we had to let her in because she had lost her shoe.
I went downstairs and talked to her—she was a 100-pound college age drunk Commercial Drive chick—and managed to convince her that ours was not the house she'd spent the night partying in, and she should look for her shoe somewhere else. Weeks later we found the shoe in the garden.
In any case, the guy who was not Dave straightened up and staggered on his way eventually. Two thoughts occurred to me later. First: if he was going to mistake a house on the street for his, wouldn't it be more likely that he'd choose one of the many identical houses across the street, rather than the most distinctive house on the street (ours)? Also, why didn't the dog bark like she always does when people come to the door? Did she think the guy was Dave too?
posted by Todd Dremver at
5:23 PM
2 Comments:
Todd: I enjoy reading your blog. It is both entertaining and informative. However, I noted a discrepancy in your entry titled "Go Away."
While you refer to your wife as Betty in the first paragraph, she is later referred to as Barbie. Just thought I'd let you know.
You're right. Was I talking about the same wife? It was the kind of evening where these things can become blurry.
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