When Things Go Bump in the Night

I woke up with a start at 4:45 Saturday morning, sure I'd heard the antique leather strip of jingle bells I keep on the back patio door give a little ring.

(It's my low-tech TJ alarm system ... he has a habit of just coming and going as he pleases, and at 3 years old, I'd like to know when he's headed out for a smoke or is smuggling juice boxes under the playset.)

I was sure I heard voices downstairs. Were we being robbed? Don't they know the only things we value are upstairs, sleeping in bunk beds and a crib?

I knew I wouldn't get back to sleep, so I grabbed the landline handset with 911 dialed and my trigger finger on the "talk" button, and headed downstairs, the 100-year-old stairs squeaking as I tiptoed. (Left a few un-repaired during the renovation ... another low-tech alarm system.)

Although the kitchen looked like it had been ransacked, I remember it looking similar when I went to bed the previous night. All was well. The only crime committed was that of an overactive imagination.

In Defense of Jumpiness

Decades ago I lay in bed, frozen in fear that an intruder was brazenly breaking into my childhood home in the middle of the night. I was probably 9 or 10 ... My parent's bonus baby, Paul, was already around, so I had to be at least that old. (Andy is our 'bonus' baby ... I highly recommend one.)

My faded yellow-flower-wallpapered room was above our Georgian's back door. I heard someone fiddling with the door knob. And I heard someone knocking on the door, first the back, then the front.

Ok, I should have known a burglar wasn't going to knock, but I was just a kid, and why weren't my parents answering the door? Had they been bludgeoned to death already?

I could hear the unanswered phone ringing in my parents' room. I figured they were already dead.

The ringing, the knocking, the doorbell, it seemed to go on forever.

Why wasn't my older brother, John, up wondering what was going on? Why wasn't Paul crying?

Was everyone dead already? Had I been spared?

That's when real fear gripped my mind and body. A ladder that had been left on the north side of the house began to move toward ... my ... window. Whomever it was on that ladder was coming after me; I was the one the Boogie Man wanted.

Oh, so young and already so self-centered.

There was a commotion outside, some loud voices then someone being raised from the dead in my parents' room. The front door opened, more loud -- angry? -- voices. Then, quiet. I wasn't dead. My parents weren't dead. My brothers were in dead sleeps but very much alive.

Story goes that my Dad* had been called to the store when its alarm was set off earlier that night. (He was a manager at a nearby Sears and used to say that when the alarm rang, he needed to get there before the cops did. There were some, ummm, trust issues.)

And he'd forgotten his house key.

Our neighbors, the Wulfs, had noticed someone lurking around the house and had been calling, trying to get my parents' attention.

I'm foggy on the details of how it all went down, but I know they somehow, after realizing it was only my Dad trying to break into his own house, were able to help him (they probably had keys).

But ever since, I jump up to investigate whenever I hear a bump in the night.

*Picture is of Dad, long before he scared me nearly to death that night.