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.