One night a rather inebriated gentleman opened our living room door
instead of the office door, and swayed on into the room. It was about
ten o'clock. I was in bed, and Grant was reading the comic section of a
newspaper that had been left in one of the cabins that morning.
"I wanna rent a cabin," the man informed Grant. "I'm all alone, all
alone. You oughta have an office, so everybody wouldn't disturb mama in
the bed there when they wanna rent a cabin."
"We do have an office," Grant pointed out. "Right over there."
The man's gaze followed Grant's gesture carefully. "Well," he said
indignantly, after a moment, "why don't you use it then?"
That alcohol scented gentleman wasn't the only person who ever mistook
our front door for the office door. Every few days we found a confused,
apologetic stranger in the process of backing hurriedly out. For awhile
we kept the door locked, in such a way that a turn of the knob would
open it from the inside, but not from the outside. That meant, of
course, that I had to let David in approximately twenty times every
hour of the time that he was home. Also, it meant that we locked
ourselves out once in a while, and had to lift David through the window
so that he could unlock the door. I dreaded the day we'd lock ourselves
out when David was in school, and I'd be the one to be lifted through
the window. Finally we decided we'd save ourselves a lot of worry by
just leaving the door unlocked all day, and by not being surprised or
upset if an occasional stranger joined our family group temporarily. I
made a mental note, though, never to run around in my slip or to get
dressed anywhere except behind the locked door of the bathroom.
Incredibly enough, there is a mistake that Grant makes far more often
than I do--that of going into an occupied cabin, thinking it's vacant.
Almost invariably if the car of the occupants of a certain cabin is
gone, and it is nearly checking out time (noon) it is safe to assume
that the occupants of the cabin have gone. Most of our customers are
gone, anyway, before ten o'clock. If there is any doubt, of course, we
can knock before entering; but after you knock, and wait before
entering, upon about fifty different occasions when you're positive
anyway that the cabin is empty, only to find that it is, as you had
supposed, quite empty, you become less careful.
The keys, if not returned to the office, are left either in the doors
of the cabins, or--more often--inside the cabins. Therefore, of course,
the fact that a key is not at the office or sticking out the keyhole of
the cabin to which it belongs does not necessarily indicate that the
people are still in the cabin.
Grant was particularly embarrassed on one occasion when he walked into
an occupied cabin. We had seen the car drive out of the garage adjacent
to the cabin, and it was ten minutes before noon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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