For one reason or another, I’ve never really been able to embrace that feeling of total careless assurance when other red-state folk boast that where they live is so safe and non-crime-addled that they never lock their doors. Nope – just can’t, don’t and won’t – and that feeling of mild paranoia goes back decades. I honestly don’t remember if Mom and Dad were scrupulous about home security, when we lived in an outlying remote and blue-collar suburb of LA, up until the early 1970s.
We had dogs, then – to include one particularly intimidating specimen; an English mastiff/black Labrador cross, who was as big as a small pony and looked like the hound of the Baskervilles. Toby scared the every-loving piss out of anyone who approached the gate around that property, even the deputy delivering a subpoena for my next youngest brother and I to testify in the case of a couple of errant local lads who ineptly burglarized the neighbors’ home that we were taking care of while the family was on vacation. (The deputy stood off at arm’s length from the chain-link gate, with the subpoena rolled up so he could feed it through the gate, while Toby leapt up and down, apparently slaveringly eager to rend flesh from bone. While that dog appeared as scary and intimidating as heck, he was also as dumb as a box of rocks and a cowardly custard as well. He just looked like the ultimate canine bad-ass… Presentation is everything, and only one person ever called his very convincing bluff.)
My habit of always locking the door behind which I would sleep at night may have initially been established in military basic training; it was certainly reinforced by a few years living in a barracks building with a long central corridor on two floors, with a lot of identical room doors. It was a mostly female barracks at that, with the occasional male visitor occasionally blundering into the wrong room. Mostly innocent mistakes – but one did hear disquieting stories about not-so-innocent escapades. My habit of taking care to lock doors and secure windows was finally cemented firmly into place with the years spent living in first suburban Athens, and then in a garden suburb outside of Zaragoza. There was a certain degree of anti-Americanism – which now and again spilled over into open terrorism; more so in the first place where it mostly took the form of vandalism or sabotage of cars with US base license plates than the second – all of this a concern for a woman living alone with a small child. My doors were always locked at night, and windows secured.
The place in Spain had bars on the windows, too; it took me a while to get accustomed to a house without such, when we finally came back to the States. I finally bought those little screw-locks to prevent windows from being opened more than a few inches and put a length of broomstick in the track of the sliding door to do the same. I suppose that someone could always break the glass, but that would make a lot of noise. I remain paranoid about ensuring that the doors to the house are bolted shut or otherwise secured at night; front, patio door and the one into the garage. I was always twitchy when we visited my parents’ retirement house: away out in the country, they still had dogs – but every room in their place had French doors out into the verandah. I could never sleep peacefully there until I went around and made certain that every single one was locked. Reading of some hideous crime where the perpetrator ‘gained access through an unlocked door’ and committed murderous mayhem in the household just makes me twitchy all over again. Securing the doors at night isn’t the only precaution that I have established by habit – there is the dog, of course – and some other things. Security cameras are amazingly inexpensive these days, too.
What about you – do you still feel save at night, behind unlocked doors, where you live? Discuss as you wish.
