"It's Who You Know, Not What You Know"

Last Saturday, we had a little problem on our hands.

Daniel had his first little league baseball game of the season, and I put all the kids in the car to take him there.  Amy was an hour away, in Greater Boston, and wouldn't be home until the evening.  But as soon as I closed and locked the front door, I made a daunting discovery;  I was using Amy's car, and hence her keys, which had no house key on the chain, and the spare key was not in the glove compartment of her car.  In other words, we were locked out, on an unusually hot day, for April, and had little hope of getting back into the house without making an hour-long trip to try to hunt down Amy at the venue where she was speaking.

I was very upset about how stupidly I had just ruined our day, but after I dropped Daniel off at the game, instead of killing time at the park with the others and then heading into Boston to try to get back into the house, I thought I should at least make some effort to "break into" our house.  So I drove back and left Ian and Madeleine in the car in the driveway, while I proceeded to "case the joint" otherwise known as our home to see if there was some non-property-destroying way of getting into our locked house without a key.  As we pulled into the driveway, I consoled myself that even if everything else I was going to try should fail, we might still somehow manage to get into the house because we had Ian in our company, and he's smarter than I am.  Somehow, having the designated Village Brainiac with me gave me some amorphous gust of encouragement that I might still manage to get into the house without breaking a screen or driving to Boston.

So I "did the needful," as some of my offshore colleagues would say, and tried all the doors and some windows to see if there was an easy way of getting in.  Of course, there wasn't, and within about ten minutes, I was about ready to give up.  Then suddenly Ian came into the part of the yard where I was playing Hapless Would-Be Burglar at that moment, and announced cheerfully that I was about to hear some good news.  Needless to say, I wanted to know more, and this is what  Ian told me:

He just happened to remember that that morning, as he and Daniel were watching TV or playing Mine Craft (the only two real possibilities for a Saturday morning), he happened to notice that Madeleine had been passing her stuffed cat back and forth through the window.  Therefore, he was confident that this particular window was still open - and unlike most windows even on our first floor, this one was quite accessible directly from the front porch without requiring any kind of makeshift ladder such as the deck chair I had been standing on trying to open windows all around the house.  I had already tried that window, but not with Ian's confidence, skill or determination.  All Ian had to do was press his hand against the window, pull his had upward, and the window opened beautifully.  Ian climbed right in, headed for the front door, and opened it up to welcome me, the older, less innovative generation, into my own house.

It's really not all that often at all that I benefit from having children who are much smarter than me; often it just enhances their unfair advantage over me in my pitiful attempts to maintain a modicum of discipline and order.  But Saturday, I was very lucky that I had one of the Smart Kids in my entourage, at the ready to help me get out of a problem of my own making.

(April 19, 2014)