Growing Up Ralph - The Door

Most people use the word crazy, I prefer eccentric. If you want your neighbors to think you are eccentric here’s a simple way to do it.

Take a door out of your garage, prop it up against an outside wall and start taking pictures of it. You’ll have three neighbors in your front yard within minutes. To convince them you’re eccentric, tell them why you kept the door for forty years and you are going to write a story about it. They’ll walk away shaking their heads.

Like any thirteen-year-old boy, I wanted a room of my own. When my father and grandfather decided to finish the basement, I was one excited kid. Every night I would be down in the basement doing what I could to help especially when they got to the part of the basement that would be my room.

Finally, one night my Dad announced that with the exception of hanging the doors the basement was finished and I could move into my room. Not having a door wasn’t bad except there were three younger kids in the family. They would just walk in whenever they felt like it.

One afternoon my Grandpa showed up and in the back of his station wagon was a beautiful site. A hollow core door and setting next to it was a doorknob complete with a lock. My grandpa saw me looking at the doorknob and made the most profound statement I had heard in my thirteen years of life, “No use closing the door if you can’t lock it.”

We framed in the door jam and then my Grandpa measured for the doorknob. He measured it several times before taking out his carpenter pencil and marking it. Even as he marked it, I didn’t think it looked right but hey, I was thirteen and had never hung a door. What did I know?

Soon the door to my room was up. That’s when Grandpa stepped back, looked at the door, frowned, and said, “My glasses must have slipped.”

His glasses did slip. He put my doorknob two feet off the ground rather than the standard three feet. I had to reach down every time I opened the door.

My Grandpa felt terrible about that mistake. He often talked about that door and repeatedly offered to replace it. Each time Grandpa and I talked about the door, the more significant it became.

Maybe the word isn’t eccentric. Maybe it’s sentimental.