Have you ever been a prisoner in your own home? I was, after my return to Fresno from El Cerrito where I had my second piano studio.
My brand new custom-made cedar gate that enclosed my front patio, had endured three days of continuous Valley showers while I was gone. In the aftermath, it just wasn’t closing right and the latch inside was suddenly misaligned. Just weeks before, I had hammered a “Beware of Dog” sign into the stucco bordering the gate, and had put an additional warning sticker on the brick column. To double on the gate and signs, I had purchased a Rex plus fake dog barking alarm that I routinely set before traveling up north. This was my New York City mentality carried over to Fresno.
Back in my Big Apple days, I would conceal mace in my pocket as I took a long walk along Broadway to my job at the New York State Employment Service. Often a released mental patient would just happen to shadow me, mumbling to himself, making some quick, jerky unexpected movements. Nothing really to worry about. Still, I routinely took the precaution to ready myself for danger at any time.
I used to ride the city bus by myself when I was just 7. It was a scenic trip up Kingsbridge Road in the Bronx to my quaint music school that stood on top of a hill. Taking bus #20 came with no fear attached. In fact, I loved to stop off on the way for a 10 cent pretzel that I bought from the street vendor.
Being scared of strangers and all that, came along later in my adulthood.
After having graduated the Oberlin Conservatory of music, I had returned to New York City and landed my first part-time job as an Employment Interviewer working for the State. For half the day I sat in a west side office environment. For the rest, I attended classes at New York University’s Washington Square campus to obtain a Master’s Degree.
My civil service assignment entailed sending out household workers to various parts of Manhattan. (Day workers, live-ins, full-timers, etc.) For the most part it wasn’t a pressure cooker job, only when employers who resided on the upscale East Side, like “Mrs. Jason Robards, Jr.” complained incessantly about damage done by a particular cleaning woman. Either the varnish was ruined on a prized dining room table, or liquor was missing from the kitchen cabinet. Nothing to really fear as a consequence.
But when a gun shot blast or two pierced through chatty conversations of awaiting applicants in the day work pool, my co-workers and I suddenly perked up. We were on edge.
The State’s Welfare office had moved into the floor below, and on occasion, an angry recipient whose check failed to materialize would shake the whole building up with a gun pop. Sometimes, if you looked out the window, you’d see pimps in fur coats standing by limousines awaiting clients. In those days, the system was not as vigilant as it is today. It was no surprise that once during business hours, a psychopath squeaked through the lines downstairs, gained admittance to our floor, and out of nowhere, attacked a staff member.
Given this backdrop of a major metropolitan area laden with crime, my having taken mace to work was not considered unusual.
Fast forward to Fresno, a high crime area competing with Los Angeles for the most polluted city on the map.
While I had never been attacked in this Valley community, I considered having a gate to be a necessary addition to my townhouse.
Since everything had hummed along since the handyman erected it and because of its newness, I had not anticipated any problems.
When I came to realize that a mechanical glitch was not going to magically disappear, I decided that I should take the bull by the horns and come up with a practical solution. With my track record of not easily fixing simple things around the house, often digging myself into deeper ditches of disrepair, I should have declined my own help.
I started by addressing the latch misalignment. I would run a cord from outside the gate to the latch, mounting a second nail right near the door closure. Bright idea? I had some dental floss doubled up which I thought carried extra strength, but it quickly snapped. That should have been my red flag not to go further. But I stubbornly continued.
My second hair brained idea was to take the cord from a Redi shade and run it along the same path as the dental floss. This time it was dragged across the flimsy nail that I had mounted very close to the area where the gate closed, and then threaded through the latch.
For about 15 minutes I had been playing with my numbskull invention, getting nowhere, since the latch was still not working properly and the gate seemed to sway with the breeze. It would not open from the outside even with my newfangled, makeshift repair, and a visitor who was staying with me, had to continuously assist by prying open the gate from inside the patio. She would manually unlatch the gate.
Finally, I made a last-ditch attempt to shake the gate furiously from the inside, hoping it would straighten itself out once and for all. I also tweaked the latch, jingling it around.
No luck!
Within 5 minutes of my jingle, jangling, and shaking, I suddenly confronted an even greater problem. The gate would not open! I pulled on it, kicked it mercilessly, and tried to pry it open with a butter knife, but it wouldn’t budge. I had to face the music. I was locked in!!!
What on earth had happened? Did the gate magically swell in the few minutes I was playing with it? Did it have a mind of its own? Was it retaliating for all the shoves and slams it had received in the present and past?
How the heck would I to get out? And how would my piano students get in? I had four scheduled for the afternoon and the first would arrive in an hour.
The gate was over 6 feet high and a ladder from the inside would not allow me an easy leap from the top. I could fall into the bushes on the patio’s smaller fence to the right, but I was in no mood to plan my complicated escape.
My students couldn’t be expected to scale such heights even with their young agile bodies.
The only solution at hand was to call Management and get “Bill,”
the gate builder to rescue me. Fortunately, this turned out to be the smoothest running part of the day. Management dispensed the house handyman, who arrived just under an hour after my desperate call. When he did, he made a dramatic entrance, like Superman, scaling the top of the gate and leaping to the concrete patio below–in a single bound!
But what the heck had transpired, I asked Clark, I mean Bill. In a flash, faster than a speeding bullet, he had pinpointed the problem as the second nail that I had hammered into the stucco. It had bent into the door track, jamming it up.
Amazing! I was impressed that this incredible hulk had a brain! But how was he going to deal with the warped gate, and latch problem? I refused to shoulder the blame for the entire misadventure just because I botched the repair.
Bill quickly sized up the situation, added some shims to the gate and stabilized it. He then adjusted the latch and ran my Redi shade cord properly from the outside over a nail placed a good distance from the entrance so everything engaged perfectly.
Abra Cadabra, the gate was fixed!
From that moment on, a mountain of worry was lifted from me. I could feel safely contained within my house without being a prisoner.
When I reflected upon the day’s events, I realized that even Aiden the cat couldn’t have effectively dug me out of the crisis I was in. With or without a gate, he would never rise to the occasion if a stranger dared to trespass on our property. For this male feline, Life would always be a bowl of Greenies. 
Now that the gate problem had been resolved, both of us felt safe and warm. We knew that leaving the house would be a piece of cake.
