A beautifully innocent,total lack of worry A STORY WORTH TELLING
“There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home.”
— Rosalynn Carter
The state-of-the-art home security panel on the wall behind me chimed a warning.
Someone was on my front porch.
A glance at the video with night-vision capabilities revealed the intruder— a big tomcat scurrying past the front door in pursuit of a June bug.
The urgency of the alert seemed comical when you compared the actual threat to my home with a system designed to fortify against tactical breaches. I think we’ve successfully turned our homes into digital fortresses.
It hasn’t always been this way. I’m old enough to remember the mythological era of childhood when “home security” was a screen door with a hook that didn’t always fit the eyelet. We didn’t lock the front door at night.
Also in those days, taking the keys out of the station wagon was an unnecessary chore.
They dangled permanently from the ignition switch on the dash. Hey, the Chevrolet didn’t even need a key to start it. GM switches in the mid-1950s worked without one.
Nobody stole it because everyone on the block already owned a used car, not much better than the one sitting in our driveway.
And our collective net worth was tied up in Tupperware, faith and a shared feeling the world was generally a safe place.
Not locking up wasn’t bravery; it was our beautifully innocent, total lack of worry. The concept of “intruders” was limited to comic books and “Dragnet.”
The late-1980s dawn of social paranoia prompted my first security system, hardwired by Ma Bell to a monitoring service in Dallas.
The beige plastic monstrosity on the wall possessed the intelligence of a toaster and the temperament of a cornered raccoon.
I recall one night at 2 a.m., the alarm company rang my bedside phone. I managed a sleepy “hello” before a real person said, “We’ve detected motion in your dining room.”
Instead of waiting for the police, I sprang out of bed and grabbed the nearest weapon — one of my size-11 loafers on the floor.
Creeping down the hallway, ready to do battle with a desperate criminal, I rounded the corner into the dining room. Instead of a burglar, however, I came face to face with a helium-filled “Happy Birthday” balloon left over from an office party. The central heat’s gentle draft carried it across the room.
Trust me, there’s nothing more humbling than standing in your shorts, wielding a shoe and negotiating with a keypad while a shiny piece of Mylar mocks you from the ceiling.
My security system today is amazing.
Cameras and motion detectors send everything to my smartphone. Still, I just can’t escape the irony of it all. We’ve traded the open-door freedom of our childhood for a pocketful of push notifications.
We are safer than ever, yet we spend evenings watching livestreams of our own empty driveways, waiting for a threat that, thankfully, rarely comes. We’ve locked the world out, but in doing so, we’ve locked ourselves into a state of permanent, high-tech anxiety.
Yet sometimes … when the autumn air is just right, I look at my deadbolt-locked front door and check the security camera video to see a ‘possum crossing my patio with a yogurt container pilfered from a trash can.
And I think about Dad’s old Chevrolet, sitting in the driveway all those years ago, with its keys in the ignition all night. Still there and ready for duty the next morning.
Contact Aldridge at leonaldridge@gmail. com. Other Aldridge columns are archived at leonaldridge.com.
