Going Up

I listened intently as the mother tried to calmly explain to her son, who was on the other side of the locked bathroom door, how to flip the deadbolt and free himself. I was inside the doctor's office; the single restroom was outside of the office space at the other end of the short hallway. Still there was no tuning out the rescue.

At first the mother seemed confident that she could free the young boy without a hitch.

"Just turn the deadbolt latch, I'm unlocking the handle with the key from outside."

Failure. Whatever the young lad was turning, it was not the deadbolt latch.

"C'mon, honey...are you turning the TOP latch? Do you know what I mean by deadbolt?"

Failure continued, desperation began to creep into Mother's somewhat higher pitched voice.

"Sweetie, are you turning anything at all in there? Listen to me. Just turn the top latch, not the thing on the door handle. I can open that from my side. Are you turning the door handle latch? Are you? It's the top one honey, the top one."

I had given up on reading my book by then. I was reminiscing. I never locked myself in a bathroom, but I did find myself at the top of an escalator without my parents. I was young...maybe four at the time. I guess I hadn't seen many escalators at that point, so I was drawn to the moving stairs. I was intrigued. I climbed on without thinking about what might happen next.

Whaddya know--the darn stairs carried me to the next floor. The tricky thing was that it was one of those stores that didn't have side by side, up and down escalators. To get back down I would have to walk around to the other side of the store.

I was four...not ready for such a complication. I could see my parents at the bottom of the escalator. Much like the mother in the hallway they started out calmly trying to explain to me, a four-year old, how to get to them. Apparently they didn't know just how complicated it was in my mind. After all, they had many more years of experience with such things.

They did their best to talk me through my dilemma, as did the young mother at the doctor's office. Her son was rescued when the receptionist scurried from behind her desk with key in hand.

Eventually, my parents realized they weren't going to be able to talk me through. I looked down to see my older brother, Mark, riding up the escalator. He took my hand, walked me around to the other side of the store and we rode down the moving stairs to the laughing faces of my parents.