Claustrophobia in the Heights

There are moments in life, when suddenly you realize you have made a bad mistake. Or maybe a lot of them. Perhaps those thoughts hit many folks right before they expire, when a train runs them down because they had on headphones and didn't hear...or the two-story deck gives way (after years of the wife nagging about the shakiness of it). Not to be morbid or anything. I found myself in a pickle last week: two stories up on a balcony, freezing cold, locked out of a vacant building. I was with a prospective realtor and we were checking out our company's cool new digs, all the way out to the fun party deck, when the door slammed shut behind us and summarily left us locked out in the weather. She looked at me, I looked at her and we started hollering "Oh no!!!!!" It was surreal, how my mind began to backtrack our steps up there. I had left my phone and purse downstairs (don't I know better than that? I'm a Realtor, for heavens' sake. Our phones are glued to our bodies. Normally). My prospect lifted her phone out of her pocket, about to die any minute. But of course. I rattled off our company phone number as she dashed about, calling the broker, to  no avail. She looked up the insurance agent who shared an office, with no luck. She called her husband, too far away. We began to shiver, brainstorming a way out of the cold. I climbed over the railing to the flat roof next door, inched my way to the exterior windows but bless Pat they were locked. This was a perfect time to panic. Yes, we were in the middle of town (two stories up and all the other buildings were one-story and down-yonder). Yes, surely someone would call back (but would the phone still have a charge?) Yes, we might freeze to death out there. My mind pondered our modern state, where we live and move from one conditioned building to another, unless you're into those gyms where they roll tires around the pavement under ungodly conditions: heat, cold, dead of night. I look with amazement on those people as I turn on the seat warmers in my SUV. I'm pitifully ill-equipped for the Apocalypse. 

Time seemed to stand still as we gaped at each other and then the tops of the buildings around us. I couldn't believe this was happening. My partner-in-crime began to talk about shimmying down the gutter. Bad ideas are born of desperation. Just as we were about to start shouting at the tops of our lungs, to passersby (though we had seen none) her phone rang. The broker said "there's a key beside the door." We hunted, felt all around it, looked high and low, to no avail. "There's a nail with a key on it." With her phone literally powering down at any second, I saw a tiny rusty key hanging, nailed to the side of a step tread. With trembling hands, for surely I would drop the thing, I tried the lock. Shouts of hallelujah went up as we bundled ourselves back into the building. I can't remember feeling so free. 

The doors that we lock behind us...sometimes we bar them to escape danger; often because we are weary; then occasionally because we are presuming the door will let us back in. There's lots of life lessons about doors, but the best ones for me, today, are about the open ones.