The Cat Burglar

A few years ago I discovered a very secret skill that I possess, and should I ever find myself unemployed I may just find myself in a new line of work—that of the cat burglar.

 

It happened like this…

 

One day while I was walking home from work, slowly winding my way through our sleepy little downtown, I happened upon my mother about to enter my father’s jewelry store.  If you don’t know my family there would be absolutely nothing strange about this. Seeing that my parents, however, had been divorced for more than a few decades and very rarely talked with each other it was, to say the least, just a little bewildering.  I called out to my mom from across the street but she couldn’t hear me through the thick layer of woolen tuque covering her ears and the steady stream of anxious thoughts there were no doubt rifling through her mind.  “Mom!” I said again, this time from a few feet away.  She looked up from the purse she was digging through, startled. “I can’t find my house keys” she said, shivering in the cold winter air.  “I’m locked out and was checking if your dad has a spare set”.  I went into the store and checked, and found out that strangely, my father—who had not lived in that house for some 25 years—did not have a key.

 

So my mother and I drove around to all the places that she had visited that day – the grocery store, the drug store, the coffee shop, and so on, and it was an interesting experience indeed to have a glimpse into a day in my mother’s Cute Little Old Person life.  In and out of the stores I went as my mother searched methodically through her black leather purse, periodically adjusting her oxygen tube and trying valiantly not to become too worried.  I checked in and around the car, under the seats, behind the seats, into all the nooks and crannies and still, no keys.  When we were certain that they were not in the car or anywhere on her person we stopped at my house and I grabbed supplies; a bent up knife, some old credit cards, and snacks (snacks being a vital component of any serious Mission like the one that we were one).  And then on we drove to my mom’s house, the same house I had grown up in from the time I was a baby all the way to my university years.

 

With my mother standing behind me, leaning on the freezer and shifting from foot to foot to take the weight off her bad hip, I tried my best to jimmy the lock on the back door with the bent up knife and the credit cards, jamming them up and down, wiggling here and nudging there.   This is actually a finely honed skill of mine, for I have made a lifetime passion of locking myself out of places and have become intimately acquainted with trying to break my way back in.

 

But alas, this time it didn’t work.   I turned to my mother and could see that she was nearing the end of her patience.  “Maybe we should just break the window” she said, eyeing up the porch for items with glass breaking potential.  This is, you see, her go to when she locks herself out.  It was somewhat of a regular occurrence in our household (I obviously inherited my talent somewhere), with the window being broken so many times I’m surprised my mother didn’t have a charge account at the glass shop.  Maybe she did.  In any case, it was somewhat of a dire situation as my mother, you see, was hooked up to oxygen, and the tank she had with her only lasted a short while.  I poked around some more at the door with the bent up knife and asked my mother how much oxygen she had left.

 

“Oh, it’s almost empty!” she cried.  My heart stopped briefly.

 

“Oh, no, it’s okay actually, I just didn’t read the dial right…” which was the usual way this scenario played out.  Trying not to panic I called my dad, my go to for any such emergency.

 

“Dad, the knife and the cards didn’t work, is there anything else we can do before we break the window?”

 

“Well, you checked the other windows, right? Were any unlocked?” he asked calmly.  My breath sucked in involuntarily as I realized I had missed a fairly obvious solution and was now feeling quite stupid.

 

“No, I hadn’t thought of that.”  Through the phone I swear I could my dad mutter “Jesus Christ” softly under his breath, his go to for most of my emergencies that aren’t really emergencies.

 

“Okay I’ll check all the windows and call you back dad, bye!” I said in one quick breath, not wanting to give him time to berate me for my oversight, and hung up the phone.

 

Outside I ran and dutifully checked the windows one by one.  It being winter they were all shut up as tight as could be, not a crack in sight.  Undaunted, I stomped my way through the snow around the perimeter of the house and found, stacked up on the patio, a set of plastic lawn chairs that we used in the dining room when my sister and I were teenagers.  My mother, you see, had been teaching us not to lean back while we were sitting at the table (this being a favorite pastime of ours) and plastic lawn chairs have a habit of just giving way and folding over backwards when you lean back in them.   More than once we had toppled over or – if we were quick enough – caught ourselves just in time.  To this day I don’t tip back in chairs and I don’t think I suffered any lasting injuries, so who am I to question her teaching methods, really?

 

After brushing the pillow of snow off the stack I grabbed three of the chairs, trudged back through the yard, and stacked them up outside the kitchen window (the biggest, and the most promising of the bunch). I begin prying away at the screen with the bent up old knife.  No luck.  It was stuck and wouldn’t give at all.  It could be due to my father having caulked the windows shut all those years ago, but you never know.  On to the next window I went, the dining room window this time, which I knew from experience had a wooden sideboard sitting just underneath—an antique piece of furniture filled with my mother’s nicest dishes and china.  Not exactly the sort of thing that you want to land on full force as you jump through a window.  But it was, unfortunately, the only window I could actually reach along the whole house with just the little plastic, treacherously bendy lawn chairs to stand on.

 

So up I climbed, and behold – with but one little poke of the knife the screen came right out!  And then, each of the windows slid right open!  Instantly my mother’s little shih tzu Foof started to bark. And bark and bark and bark.  Leaning over the gap between the chair and sill I reached through the window and took the bedraggled Christmas cactus off its window hook, jumped down from the chairs, and ran back to the porch to give the plant to my mother for safe keeping.  I could tell she had been sizing up her oxygen tank and plotting how to use it break the window, weighing the cost of replacing the glass (again) and the possibility of the tank exploding against the effort of doing so and the extra oxygen she would consume as a result.  She rubbed the dial and looked at me over the top of her glasses, and I knew I didn’t have much time.

 

Back to the window I went.  Using the light from my cell phone as a little flashlight I looked around the darkened room: yes, the sideboard was under the window as I had thought, filled with the family heirloom china; on top of the sideboard was a photo of my mother’s best friend and her daughter, and of course, the sideboard itself, a beautiful piece made of teak given to my mother by her father and which somehow survived my sister and I abusing it throughout our childhood.  To the left of the sideboard was another antique, this time a little teak side table that cleverly flips over to be a fruit bowl.  All in all I was surrounded by a veritable menagerie of precious items, covered in a layer of papers and magazines and all sorts of glossy and imminently slippery paraphernalia.

 

I slipped off my boots and started to climb.  I managed to bring myself up just high enough so that I was balanced right on the window sill, half in and half out of the house.  From somewhere deep inside my being a little voice piped up and I knew that this was the point of no return; if I were to go any further I would not be able to back myself out of the window, and there was a good chance I would just slide right on down through the window, crash into the sideboard, and break my neck as I hit the floor head first, all while my mother ran out of oxygen in the back porch, gasping as she tried to lift the oxygen tank up to break the window with the last of her strength.  But then another little, louder voice chimed in and said “Isn’t this sooooo exciting?  Isn’t this just fan-fucking-tastic??” Even the thought of potentially breaking a limb was sort of thrilling.  I suppose this is what sky-divers feels just as they are about to jump out of the plane—and so I jumped!

 

Well, more like pushed off really, and propelled myself through the window while gently easing the top half of my body down, panther-like, onto the top of the sideboard.  I kept all of my weight on my legs which were still hooked on the window sill, not wanting to crush the slender, elegantly tapered legs of delicate cabinet below me.  I then slid myself along the top of the sideboard until I could reach the fruit bowl-table and put my weight there, knowing from experience climbing on it as a child that it was quite strong.  Once I was mostly inside, I slid my body sideways and over, much like an acrobat, and magically brought my legs gently down onto the floor.  I had done it!  And literally not a single paper was out of place; not a piece of china was broken; and my mother was even still breathing when I ran to the back porch to unlock the door and let her in.  Needless to say after this I made about seven copies of the keys to mother’s house and stashed them all over, and my father even has a set of his own now.