Locked Out or Locked In, It's All the Same
Perhaps the greatest fear a person can have short of going to hell when one dies, is the fear that they might become locked into their own minds, and locked out of reality at the same time. Dementia and Alzheimer diseases are two examples of this condition. Another would be where a person has an active and normal mental state but is incapable of communicating anything to anyone. I certainly would not like to be in any of those conditions. Although I have made jokes about the good thing about Alzheimer disease is that, you get to meet new people every day; it really is not funny.
Can you imagine the frustration, confusion, disorientation, and fear that probably results from not being able to communicate or understand what is happening around you or even to you? It is easy for me to imagine it as I have been “locked out” and “locked in” a few times in my life so I remember the feeling. I imagine I would feel mental anguish a thousand times worse, if I had any of those conditions permanently.
My future wife got off from work one Friday night in Pensacola and drove to her mother's home 50-miles away in Niceville (yes, that's a real town). Her arrival at about 9PM was unexpected and her mother refused to let her in for the night, effectively locking her out of the home where her childhood bedroom was. In desperation she came to my trailer (or called me first) where upon I let her stay that night and the rest of the weekend. I knew how she felt because her tears and words were communicating perfectly.
As a youngster, I was fairly fearless or perhaps my parents would have used different words such as thoughtless or even stupid. Even then, I had a healthy case of acrophobia. Climbing the ladder to join my father on the roof of our single-story home was no problem. The problem manifested upon my turning around to get back on the ladder to go down. Anyway, at about 14-years old my father had taken me to somewhere in Minnesota to visit one of his childhood friends who just happened to have two boys, both younger than me.
These boys were truly farm boys, while I was only a 2-year “pretender” to farm life. As farmer's sons, they naturally had to help with all the farm work, which included stacking hay bales in the hayloft of the barn during summer harvesting. So being boys, they stacked the bales to create a secret passage to their “hideaway” near one of the windows in the wall that was hidden by 10 or 15 feet of stacked hay. There were three hidden access “tunnels” to the hideaway; two along the wall and one in the middle of the hayloft with a vertical drop and a crawl-only tunnel at the bottom under tons of hay.
The boys told me about their hideaway and wanted to show it to me so I went to the barn with them being anxious to see what I had only fantasized doing while living on my grandfather's farm. By this time in my life I had mentally matured somewhat so I was not thoughtless, but still not completely un-stupid either. The boys would only take me to their hideaway if I used the vertical shaft as the entrance. I looked at the opening and told them that I was too big to fit and they said there was plenty of room as they were not that much smaller than me. My common sense was overruled by my desire to see the hideaway and so ignoring my eyes, which had been telling me the truth, I started down the shaft to the bottom and then managed to back into the tunnel, which was only about 9 inches high and 13 or 14 inches wide. I managed to crawl backwards about four feet and then got stuck. I spent three-months stuck under all that hay during the five-minutes it took them to use one of the other tunnels to get behind me and pull me feet first into the hideaway. Using the other entrances along the wall I easily returned to the surface of the hay. Needless to say, I've been claustrophobic ever since, all because of being locked-in under a “mountain” of hay and locked-out of normal life.
One could say that I was locked-out of a normal life because beginning in high school I was not attracted to girls' looks but only their personalities and only then when thinking about having someone with which to go to movies or other non-sexual activities associated with dating—at that time I only fantasized sexually about boys. Although this has not been as explosively traumatic as being stuck under tons of hay and the result thereof, this type of locked-out was nonetheless a chronically mild trauma whose persistent presence kept building consequences beyond it's apparent significance. Of course it didn't help that apparently none of my female classmates took any interest, sexual or otherwise, in me either even though I was always a gentleman, respectful, and spoke with them easily. However, I never asked any of them for a date and they never offered either.
As I've mentioned in prior stories, my emotional trauma caused by my parents incorrectly shutting me out of their divorce situation and my father erroneously waiting to tell me about it the night before he left, was for me the most important and crippling locked-out or locked-in depending upon point of view. Having access to only half, if even that much, of the range of possible human emotions is not desirable or even close to being a good thing. If one is so severely locked-in to depression and locked-out of empathy, how could one feel the opposites? I could not feel joy or true happiness as they were denied me until the effects of the emotional locked-out could be reversed or canceled. Fortunately, for me, as I have stated before, I am now free of those influences and am emotionally whole, but still learning how to deal with the new emotions.
Being free of emotional lockouts does not prevent my unfortunate tendency towards being physically locked-out. After I got married a new mental condition surfaced—forgetfulness. I suspect I may have had it before, but my wife certainly was able to point it out. I don't know if it is a genetic condition or if it is a naturally occurring phenomenon of marriage as I've heard almost all wives complaining about their husbands’ lack of memory.
My wife and I once visited Arches National Monument on a nice hot summer day. As I exited the vehicle and shut the door, I suddenly realized that I had left the keys in the ignition. My wife had left her purse under the seat so we had no keys and the doors were locked. We were locked-out of our vehicle and locked-in to the great American Desert—without a cell phone—without water—without clothing for nighttime in the desert—and most importantly without a coat-hanger or any other object with which to unlock the door. Eventually, another tourist happened by and gave us a hanger.
I tend to believe in my genetic theory of carelessness or forgetfulness; perhaps they are really manifestations of the same thing. Even when my wife was not around to be involved, I would still lock myself out of my vehicles occasionally but still far too often. This was most evident and embarrassing while I was serving as a Missile Security Officer in Montana, Arkansas, and South Dakota.
Part of my military duty was to drive around the “missile field” to visit and inspect the security police guards. I had a deserved reputation of locking myself out of my vehicle while over 200-miles away from the base where the spare keys were. Fortunately, I had personnel on my security flight that grew up in New York City, so they had the skills needed to open locked vehicles and they were only 20-miles away on the average.
Eventually, I began to carry two sets of vehicle keys with me whenever I leave home. I still lock myself out occasionally, but now I don't need help when it happens. Who says you can't teach a senior citizen new tricks?
© 9 January 2012
About the Author
When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.
I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.
My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com
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