How to Save a Life

The garage of the first house we lived in was double-wide, but it was filled, every inch, with Stuff. Stuff that belonged to my grandparents, mostly, as they owned both the house and the garage. Still, Stuff is Stuff whoever owns it, and Stuff is exceptionally irritating to a well-organized person like my mother.

When we moved to our new house, Mom was excited to have a garage completely devoid of Stuff. We used the garage as it was intended, for vehicles, until around the time Baby Brother was born. At this point, the garage began to fill with Christmas decorations, bicycles, and even a kitchen table until no cars would fit inside. It, too, had become a receptacle for Stuff.

But, before this happened, my parents' minivan fit perfectly in the garage. Granted, it wasn't often there, because Mom was busy chauffeuring her four daughters and bright-eyed toddler Little Brother from place to place to place. We all spent a significant percentage of our childhood in the car.

On one of those days, when Mom was rushing the five of us out somewhere, the garage door would not open. When the button was pressed, it shuddered and rose about six inches off the ground. Then it stopped, and nothing we did could persuade it to move.

Mom, flustered and in a hurry, was pressing the button repeatedly. At that moment I don't think she was at all grateful for the Stuff-less garage she had wanted so much. Little Brother, who had been around long enough to know that we simply must get into the car somehow, got down on his tummy and began to slither under the garage door. The rest of us were fretting and whining and wondering if we'd ever get wherever it was we were trying to go.

Mom hit the garage door button one last time. The door began to move! But it did not move up. It moved down...directly onto Little Brother's neck.

Our parents had assured us several times that there was nothing to be feared from the garage door. It had, they said, some kind of sensor that kept it from squashing little children like ourselves. It was, they said, perfectly safe.

Perfectly safe...but still bearing down on the neck of a little boy! My mom and sisters reacted in the natural fashion.

MOM: (screamed)

OLDER SISTER: (screamed)

LITTLE SISTER: (screamed)

BABY SISTER: (screamed)

I hardly ever scream, so I decided instead to express my terror by leaping forward and heaving the garage door upward.

MOM: YOU SAVED HIM!!!

I had. But there was no saving the garage door. Eventually, it could only be raised or lowered by hand, which may have contributed to our not using the garage anymore. But the fact that it can't easily be opened suits my mom just fine. It keeps the neighbors from seeing the heaps of Stuff.