Last night, I was reclining in what I refer to as my “Queen’s chair.” Mark was out with a friend at a college basketball game. Kaitlyn had gone to bed long ago and Davis more recently. Shannon had just returned home from work, and quickly headed upstairs to the loft to puzzle over her government books and calc notes. The family room was eerily quiet, despite Bob Costas gushing over Shaun White at the Olympic games, in what appeared to be a fake fire and a false living room.
I thought of my time living alone, as a single gal in her twenties, and again, as a single mom, in her thirties, with a toddler. Nights used to frighten me when I was little. I would make my sisters come to the bathroom with me, even though they were in my care. Even as a babysitter, alone, in strange home, with children entrusted to my care, I would let the boogie man get the best of me.
When I turned 10, my family’s home had been burglarized the night of the showing after my grandfather passed away. The police told us later, that crooks actually scrutinize the obits for instances where they can make a quick score, knowing that no one would be home. I had been the first one to pass through the breezeway door, with our neighbor, Aunt Kay, behind me. As I approached the heavy oak door leading to the house, I found it ajar, with several chunks of wood removed in beaver-like fashion. Aunt Kay came up quickly behind me, understood what had happened and quickly shooed me away. We could hear someone opening a window in a back bedroom (it was a small ranch), and voices trailing out across the back yard.
Luckily, we never came face to face with these crooks, but the incident stuck with me in my later years. Each time I would return home from somewhere, the prospect of the front door being pried open always crossed my mind.
During college, young women hear warnings everyday about rape, violence, break-ins. I felt like my entire college career was spent with eyes in the back of my head at night. Of course, there were plenty of times when I should not have been out at night, or at least that late, and therefore, I had every reason to be looking over my shoulders.
We lived a few blocks off campus my junior and senior year, in a four unit brownstone. I lived on the bottom floor and was alone that summer until a roommate would join me in the fall. Next door, two girls I knew from the nursing program, took up living quarters. We used to peer out the window to speak to each other, that’s how close the brownstones were. But one night, as I was strolling through my apartment, I caught a glimpse of someone peeking into my window from the ground level. My heart raced. I called my girlfriends next door. We kept each other on the phone, ensured that each of us had locked our doors and windows and another roommate ran upstairs to use the neighbor’s phone to call the police. Even when the police arrived, I was still shaking, challenged in opening the door.
Incidents such as these were floating in my mind that night in the Queens chair, as Mark and I had recently toured Over the Rhine, looking at single family homes that would soon be on the market, available for rehab. A builder we knew of from Loveland had taken us on a tour of a four block radius surrounding Washington Park. For anyone who did not follow the news, that area had been and continued to be a problem area with blighted buildings and homeless. There was so much effort in resurrecting what was once a glorious past in that part of town, and Mark and I had been considering being a part of a glorious, if long awaited future.
But I wondered, if I was sitting home, alone, at night, in downtown’s Over the Rhine, waiting for Mark to come home, would I feel safe? Would the popping of the popcorn in the microwave cause me to think gunshots? Would the wind’s rattling of old windows cause me to think, some one is at the door. And if someone really was at the door, how would I respond? Living in a building of condos versus a single family home, I could wrap myself in a blanket of security, with alarms, other neighbors and the height of the buildings. But the blanket itself would also turn into a barrier that would keep us from crossing the divide between living for myself, as Meriwether Lewis once wrote, or living for mankind. If we are going to be pioneers, then we should blaze the trail ourselves.
"I had in all human probability existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world ... I had as yet done but little, very little, indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now sorely feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended ... I resolved in future, to redouble my exertions ... to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself."
- Meriwether Lewis, August 18, 1805, on occasion of his 31st birthday
