Just call me Lady MacGiver.

You know the sinking feeling you get in your stomach at the moment you realize you’ve done something both stupid and irreversible? I had the displeasure of experiencing that feeling at about 8:00 last night.

Every other Thursday, I lead a team of volunteers in packing 100 bags of groceries to be distributed to the needy on Friday morning. We pack the bags in the meeting space of a church. If we are the last group to leave the building, it’s my responsibility to lock up using a key I have checked out from the parish office.

Such was the situation last night. After all my volunteers left, I diligently locked the pantry room and the back door, turned out the lights, and walked out the front door. Since the parish office is usually closed by the time we finish, I return the key by dropping it through the mail slot. It was right after I dropped the key through the slot last night that I realized I had not locked the front door of the church. It was also at this moment that it started pouring. It was like something out of a movie. In a bad way.

So, there I was. I was at a complete loss of what to do. Part of me wanted to just walk away. After all, what could I really do? But as I looked through the window of the unlocked door at the hundreds of dollars of groceries we had just bagged, I couldn’t bear the thought of the people who would come looking for them tomorrow being turned away because they had been taken. I had to do something.

I started by going back to the office and ringing the door bell. There was a slim chance that someone was still working inside. But no one came to the door. Then I spent a few minutes trying to reach the key through the mail slot, both with my hand and with several thinner objects. No dice. I couldn’t even see exactly where the key was, so it was really a hopeless endeavor. Then, on a whim, I tried the door. Could it be that someone else had the same slip of the mind as me, and left this door open? Nope. I was the only idiot on duty last night.

At this point I declared the key a lost cause and returned to the church. I couldn’t get the key, but what else could I do? I examined the lock itself carefully and flirted with the idea of trying to turn it without the key. But the doors on the church are pretty new and the locks are in mint condition. The last thing I needed was to do permanent damage to something.

I stood staring for a minute, almost ready to just walk away and hope for the best. But then it occurred to me that the door didn’t have to be locked so much as it just had to be un-open-able. Was there some other way to keep it closed? You have to pull the door to open it from the outside, so bracing something against it on the inside was not going to work. I thought about wedging something underneath it, but again, it would have to be on the outside to work.

After more minutes of standing and staring than I care to admit, I had a flash of insight. I was dealing with a set of double doors, and only one was unlocked. So if I could figure out a way to attach the unlocked door to the locked one, that would do the job.

I dug around in my bag for something I could use to tie the handles together, but anything I found was much too flimsy to do any good. I looked at the doors some more. Both doors had thin metal bars running vertically from top to bottom, near the place where the doors meet. The bars were part of the locking system, and there was a centimeter or two of space between the doors and the bars. If I could find something thin and stiff to place behind both bars, it should keep the unlocked door from being opened.

I didn’t have anything fitting that description in my bag, so I went back into the church to look around. It only took a moment to see my salvation: a large coat rack full of hangers made not of flimsy wire, but of sturdy pieces of metal about a centimeter wide. I grabbed one, placed it behind the bars on the door, and pushed on the unlocked side. It moved a little, but not much. I pushed harder. The hanger stayed in place, and so did the door. The solution was marvelous in its simplicity, really. I breathed a sigh of relief and exited though a different door, feeling a bit mollified if still a bit stupid.

As I walked to grocery store and then took the train home, I couldn’t help but think of another similar incident in my life. Early one Saturday morning when I was in grad school, I left my apartment to take my laundry down to the basement, closing the door behind me. When I tried to come back in, I discovered that my doorknob would not turn. My mind flashed back to the day before, when my landlord had come by to show someone the apartment. He asked if I’d like him to lock the door when he left, and I said yes. Apparently, instead of locking the deadbolt, he locked the knob. Before this moment, I hadn’t even realized the knob had a lock. Now, it was 7am on a freezing February morning, and I was locked out of my apartment with no roommate, no keys, no shoes, no coat, and no phone.

After trying in vain for a while to wake up my neighbors (who were undergrads and likely passed out), I sat staring at the door for a while trying to decide what to do. (Sound familiar?) When nicely asking my cat to turn the knob didn’t work, I retreated into the basement to look around.

Lucky for me, the basement of the building was packed with tons of old junk that former tenants had left behind – furniture, tools, utensils, clothes, you name it. I gathered anything I thought might allow me to open the door and carried it back up the stairs. Thinking of the slide-the-credit-card trick you so often see on television, I first tried sliding index cards along the door. After shredding my supply of those, I turned to trying to pick the lock with a nail and then the tines of a fork. That got me nowhere. From that point on, my attempts to open the door got more and more complicated. But hark! After nearly 90 minutes of fiddling, I finally got the door open by wedging the door as far away from the frame as it would go using a pair of wire cutters, pushing back the tab of the doorknob as much as I could manage using another object I can’t remember (perhaps a fork?), and then using a butter knife as a screw driver to remover the metal faceplate around the hole in the doorframe. That gave me the few extra millimeters I needed, and I did a little dance of victory when I walked through the door.

I told that story often in the year or so after it first happened, and perhaps my favorite memory associated with it is when I told my dad. I’ll never forget his reaction. He laughed, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “You are my daughter.”

He was right. Everything about that incident has the mark of my dad’s genes. He’s always been a wondrous Mr. Fix-It. Tell him what you need, and an hour later he will have built you something to do the job. It won’t always work the way you expect it to work, but it will work.

When I was growing up, I was always kind of a one-track thinker. If I couldn’t do something in an obvious way, I didn’t know what else to do, and that’s when I turned to my dad. He’d always come up with something. I never thought of myself as being like him that way, but maybe I just wasn’t like that because I never had to be. Now that I’m older, and living on my own, I’m forced to figure things out for myself. Luckily, I am my father’s daughter, and I know I’ll always come up with something in the end.

When I arrived home last night, I was forced to swallow my pride and email the parish business manager to tell him what happened. After all, even with a key, no one was getting in that particular door now, and I didn’t want him to try to force it open.

Far from being upset, he seemed impressed. I couldn’t help but giggle when I read his response this morning. It said, “Hey MacGiver (I’m sure he meant MacGuyver, but the hilarity of the word “give” being in his spelling is not lost on me)! Last night I couldn’t visualize how you closed the door with a coat hanger. This morning I saw. Good job!”

**Takes a bow.** Thank you, thank you! If I were accepting an Oscar for this performance, I would thank my dad. Perhaps I should thank him, anyway.

Thanks, Dad. Love always from your daughter.

"This is to have succeeded..."

Every few weeks, I receive an email from my undergrad alma mater’s alumni association. I confess that I often delete these emails without even opening them. Don’t get me wrong. I love WMU and don’t regret a single day I spent there. But we are neither big nor prestigious, and the alumni association’s headlines usually fail to impress me. “Current student competes in Miss USA pageant.” (Not even Miss America.) “Feasibility of WMU medical school considered.” (But no decision expected any time soon.)

However, a few days ago I received one that caught and held my attention: “WMU President Emeritus Diether Haenicke passes away.” I was taken aback by the instant profound wave of sadness that passed through me. I have not spoken to Dr. Haenicke since I left Western. He was not president while I was a student. He was not my advisor or any other consistent presence in my life while I was in school or since. Yet I find that I am in mourning, and over the past few days, I’ve been paging through my memories of him in an attempt to understand why.

I first met Dr. Haenicke during my first week of classes at WMU. He co-taught an honors seminar I was taking all about Joan of Arc. When I registered for the class, I had absolutely no idea who he was. During the first session, he introduced himself as simply Dr. Haenicke, but the other instructor made sure to point out that he had been president of the university before the current president. I was duly impressed and quite nervous, but I tried to see this as an opportunity. I told myself to be cool and make a good impression during the course of the semester.

I completely blew that goal exactly one week later. The seminar was a once-a-week, Wednesday night class, and Dr. Haenicke told us that over the coming weeks, he was going to take us all out for dinner after class, in groups of five or so. As this is the sort of situation that makes me (or at least, used to make me) horribly anxious, I signed up for the first dinner, telling myself it was better to get it over with. So, after our second class session, I found myself in the back seat of Dr. Haenicke’s car with some other students, on my way to a Chinese restaurant.

I have almost no memory of the dinner itself; I only know it went smoothly and I was feeling happy and confident as Dr. Haenicke was driving us back to campus. It was raining, so he offered to take each of us to our individual dorms. I was the first to be dropped off. He popped his trunk for me, and I jumped out of the car, grabbed my backpack from the trunk, and hurried up the walk toward the door. It was about five seconds later, just as I was reaching for the door handle, that I realized that I had sprinted away without closing the trunk. My stomach sank and as I turned around and watched the former president of the university (whom had just bought me dinner, by the way) step out into the pouring rain as a result of my stupidity. We made eye contact for the briefest of moments, and then he was back in the car and pulling away.

I walked back up to my dorm room and contemplated never leaving again. I felt like I could never show my face to Dr. Haenicke again. Things did seem a bit less bleak the next morning, but not for long. I went to a morning history lecture and then scampered to my 10AM psychology lab. As I walked toward the building, I couldn’t help but notice the name spelled on it in giant black letters: Haenicke Hall. The reality of whom I had embarrassed myself in front of slammed home yet again, and I secretly prayed that I would never see Dr. Haenicke again.

Obviously, that particular prayer was not answered. Not only did I see Dr. Haenicke every week in my Joan of Arc course, I also found out that he was heavily involved in the Medallion program, the very scholarship program that was funding my education. Every individual scholarship is named for either a donor or an honoree, and one of the winners in my year was the recipient of the Diether Haenicke Medallion. Dr. Haenicke was present at almost every reception and dinner I attended for the program for the next four years.

It could have been a horribly embarrassing situation every time we met, but Dr. Haeniecke never held the trunk against me. He greeted me warmly every time we met, and if he ever had reason to introduce me to someone else, he made mention of my insightful comments in class or my well-written final exam, not of my failure to close his trunk. He did not write me off as hopeless or unworthy, as he so easily could have. Instead, he forgot my shortcomings and noticed my potential. He humbled me not by looking down on me, but by treating me as an equal. In that way, he challenged me to be a better person.

After a lot of reflection, I realize that is why I am so sad to hear of his passing. Even though my day to day life will not change at all as a result of his death, I still know that the world at large is suffering a profound loss. The world was a better place while he was around, not only because of the person he was, but because of the person he expected you to be while you were around him.

I am just recently 26. I realize this is young by almost any measure, but I still find myself worrying from time to time that I am wasting these precious years of my life. As happy and satisfied as I claim to be right now (and I am, really!), I can’t help but wonder if I will look back some day and regret not spending my twenties traveling the world or at least doing something more incredible than going to bar trivia. I’m sure I’ll have similar worries throughout my life. My greatest fear is wasting this life I’ve been given. I never know how I will measure success; I am never sure how I will tell if I have done enough with my life to deserve this greatest of gifts.

In saying goodbye to a teacher and mentor, I think I may have found an answer.

Rest in peace, Dr. Haenicke. If, when I die, even one person remembers me the way I remember you, I will know I’ve done enough.

Batty for Books

I love books.

It’s a common statement – perhaps even a cliché – but I feel like it’s a lesser known fact about me. When I was growing up, it was my sister that was considered the avid reader. Laurie was the one that got the “Book Lady” tote bags, the autographed book release posters, and the bookstore jobs. People knew I liked to read, too, but it wasn’t part of my identity the way it was a part of hers.

I suppose I can understand why things ended up this way. Laurie is a speed reader. She can read a book a day, easy. In fact, she’s probably read more books by now than I will read in my lifetime. She skims through them, understanding the plot and main points if not every single subtle nuance.

I, on the other hand, plod through books like I am wading through quicksand. I read every single word and contemplate the meaning of every single sentence. I’m forever flipping back to reread parts that have suddenly become more important or to make sure I have all the characters and the chronology straight in my head. When I finish a book, I know the story and characters intimately, at least until the details are pushed out of my memory by a new book. It takes me a long time to read a book, even the easy ones – and a hard read will take me over a month sometimes. This methodical technique of complete comprehension is probably one of the things that makes me so good at my job.

My slow, careful reading style also has another effect: my complete and total immersion into the world of a story. When I’m reading a book, particularly one I really like, the real world around me starts to face away. I see the setting and characters, and almost hear them speaking. I have some sort of vague awareness of the things going on around me; I’ll respond if someone says my name, but I usually have to ask people to repeat any questions they ask me. Reading is almost time travel to me.

Mostly, I love this about myself. I like being able to completely abandon the real world, if only temporarily, anytime I want. But this time-travel phenomenon also has an unexpected consequence that may get me into trouble one day. You see, when I’m deep into a good book, I never completely come back from the story world, even when I’m not reading. My habit of completely immersing myself into the story affects the way I react to things in the real world.

Let me give you a few examples from the book I’m reading right now. It’s a thousand-page historical fiction novel about life in 14th-century England. About halfway through the book, my favorite character, Caris, was accused of practicing witchcraft. It terrified her – witchcraft was both impossible to prove and impossible to disprove in those days, and superstitions usually won out. Almost any woman who was accused of witchcraft ended up being sentenced to death. Caris only narrowly escaped this fate herself. She confessed her sins and her death sentence was suspended so long as she took vows and became a nun. It was a horrible sacrifice for her, as she was in love and supposed to be married days later.

Reading that part of the story made me both sad for Caris and scared for women in general. But not just the women in the story – all women, then and now, including myself. A couple of days later, I was walking home from the train stop, and it started to rain. I instinctively reached for my hood. But then I hesitated as I remembered which coat I was wearing. It’s a blue corduroy jacket, and on the back are sewn white patches that spell “WICH,” an acronym for Wizards In CHicago, for an informal Harry Potter fan club of which I am a member. Usually the patches are hidden by the hood, but putting the hood up would expose them. As I thought about that, I remembered Caris and her trial, and I worried that the wrong person would see the patches and accuse me of being a witch. I walked the rest of the way home letting the rain soak my hair and face. I was too afraid to put the hood up.

Nuts, right? First of all, the likelihood of anyone even noticing the patches was slim. Second, even if anyone did, I doubt his or her first thought would be to accuse me of witchcraft, as it is 2009 and generally accepted that witchcraft is not possible. Third, even if some person DID accuse me of being a witch, there’s no way I would be sentenced to death. I know all those things, yet the world of the story has become so real for me that I couldn’t quite shake the fear.

Later in the book, the plague strikes the village and half of the population dies. The people become paranoid and fearful, and every sniffle and sneeze is looked upon with dread. Hence, paranoia struck me, too. I was at work one day last week, and I overheard one of my coworkers say to another something as mundane as, “How are you feeling?” My first, fleeting thought? “Oh, no, I hope he doesn’t have the plague!” I quickly quashed that thought before I said anything foolish, but I acknowledge that I thought it, anyway. Even though I was at work, reading about exponential regression, a part of me was still in Kingsbridge, England, in 1337.

As I said before, even though I like how deeply involved I get into book, I worry that someday I will say something completely batty and be locked up for life. Sometimes, I don’t quash my reactions so easily. Yesterday, at the end of my lunch break, I read a passage from the book where one of the male characters does something unforgivably selfish and cowardly. Before I could stop myself, I slammed the book closed and said, “Even in the 14th century, men were stupid.”

No one who overheard seemed to think I was crazy. Lucky for me, I suppose, that some things never change.

Otherwise known as Furry Boot Girl

Winter sucks. There’s just no getting around it. Highs in the single digits and below zero wind chills make life miserable for everyone who has to so much as step outside. However, I’m convinced that those that suffer the most are those that wait for the bus. There’s no way to describe the sense of misery I feel as I step off the train on one of those cold, cold mornings and walk to the bus stop, knowing I could be standing there for over half an hour.

It’s hard to feel alone in my suffering, though, when I see the same people at the bus stop every morning. In my 15 months of commuting to the loop on the brown line, even though I always waited at the same stop, I never recognized anyone. Somehow, the bus stop is different. It’s like an odd little club we have – everyone knows everybody else, usually not by name, but at least by sight.

It’s an odd social situation, really. I’m both fascinated and frustrated by it. I see these people more often than my family or most of my friends. Consequently, I will sometimes mention them when I’m telling people about my day. But it’s difficult to refer to a nameless face. So what do I do? Ask their names, in an effort to fight the isolation in a crowd that all of us city-dwellers live with? No, silly readers. That would require a great deal of initiative and the breaking of many unspoken public transportation courtesies. Instead, I assign them my own set of names.

There’s a girl, probably around my age, that waits for my bus in the morning. She almost always has a coffee in her hands, and wears a red ski jacket. What really strikes me about her, though, is her curly hair, especially since it’s often still wet as she stands in the cold. Ergo, I know her as Curly Hair Girl. We commiserate about the cold from time to time, but I really know nothing else about her.

Once I board the bus, there are a few other people I always see. One man is almost a fixture in the front side-facing seats. He’s there, every morning, with a thread of yarn slowly being pulled out of his backpack as he knits or crochets. To this day, I can’t figure out how he keeps his stitches so straight on a bouncing bus. He’s Knitting Guy.

There’s another man – a bit of a newcomer, starting to ride my bus a month or two ago – that sits in the same seat each morning, facing straight ahead and scowling. His coat is an unappealing shade of orange. He’s Angry Orange Coat Guy.

Of course, there are a few regulars at on my bus home, as well. One is an older woman with a fabulous head of long white hair, always held in place by combs. She’s friendly with the drivers and very likable. She’s White Hair Lady.

Another regular is a boy who must be a student at the U of Chicago Lab School. He’s always camped out in a corner in the back, working on his homework. Hence, he is Homework Kid. Before he gets off the bus, he always does a second check of his seat to make sure he has everything. For some reason, this always makes me smile. His mom taught him well.

You may think I’m odd for assigning these people such goofy names. I thought I was odd, too, at first. But then I learned I am not the only one who does this. I have a coworker that sometimes rides my bus home, and we had a discussion about this once. Turns out we both have the same name for White Hair Lady.

Not all our names are the same, though. On one bus ride we shared, when a twenty-something I call iPod Guy got off the bus, I mentioned his name to my coworker. She said something to the effect of, “Oh. I’ve always just called him ‘Guy Who Gets Off Here and Goes That Way.’” (And you thought my names were bad!)

To be fair, some people are kinder with their names than me. I sometimes ride a bus home that makes only limited stops. Since the stops are so far apart, there’s tons of time for passengers to pull the cord that signals the bus driver to stop. However, regardless of when you pull the cord, you only have to do it once. There’s one woman that stands for the entire 7 minutes between her stop and the one prior, tossing her hair long black back and forth and pulling the cord every thirty seconds. For some reason, I find this unspeakably annoying. My friend has seen this woman, too. She calls her Long Hair Lady. Me? I call her Obnoxious Cord Puller.

While finding out that I wasn’t the only one that did this made me feel a little better, another thought also occurred to me. If people I know also create these names, people I don’t know must do so as well. And that means I’ve probably got a name or two of my own.

But what do people call me? I’ve got some theories. Last winter, I tended to wear my black peacoat with a bright red hat. This year, I’m partial to my down coat and my pink scarf. So I’m guessing there’s at least a few people who know me as Red Hat Girl or Pink Scarf Girl.

One never knows what will catch people’s attention, though. Maybe the hat and scarf are not my most distinctive features. Maybe people remember me for my love of the RedEye crossword, and I am Crossword Puzzle Girl. Perhaps people can’t understand why I choose to stand outside the bus shelter, even in the bitter wind, and I am Shuns the Shelter Lady. To the other woman who carries the same commuter bag as me, I imagine my name is Woman Who Has My Bag. Or it could be that my habit of saying hello to the driver when I get on and thank you when I get off is my most distinctive feature, and I’m Girl Who Talks to the Driver.

I’d love to believe that last one is the most prevalent name I have. Unfortunately, I think Furry Boot Girl is far more likely.