Saturday in New Haven

To those of you checking the blog for our advancement and journal entries regarding the progress of the trip, thanks for looking in on us and please know that we are progressing but that we have not progressed out of CT yet. We have been spending more time doing what we still think is required for us to set it up and leave responsibly and properly to avoid kickback from leaving our affairs out of order (a theme previously discussed in an earlier entry). We have every intention to be complete and to shove off on Saturday the 15th but the impending snow storm, scheduled for this weekend, (a nor'easter - as one friend described as a hurricane with snow included), may hold us ashore until Monday or Tuesday. We are close and in a good place and the excitement is mounting. Jasper is very glad for yesterdays snow storm and as a matter of fact we are, as I complete this note, heading up the street to do some sledding on Foss Hill for hopefully the last time this year. We'll see!
I have to write yet one more, albeit a different angle, story about our leaving or better said not leaving. It is clear to me at this juncture that we were not supposed to leave when we said we were going to. There seems to be another plan for our time over and above what we thought was appropriate. This is in addition to the awareness I expressed in the last blog entry; The Final Final List.
On Friday night, actually Saturday morning, December 1 at 1:10m AM after having crawled into bed at midnight, my cell phone rang. Megan heard it first (or and least was willing to move first) and got back out of bed to look at the caller ID. She let me know that it was our friend Charles calling from his newly remodeled condo in New Haven. Moving up from NYC, he began living there, with his partner Socheata, after we completed the renovations this past August and simultaneously began attending Yale Divinity School amongst the many other major endeavors he is involved in with his significant other. Check out their award winning documentary “New Year Baby” (newyearbaby.net) While I was slowly reentering from dream land and simultaneously trying to process why he would be calling me at this hour, we missed the call and it went into voicemail. After a minute of clearing my head I got the phone from Meg and listened to the message.
“Bill, this is Charles. We have an issue here. We are alright but we have had a break in and robbery down stairs while we were upstairs in bed. It occurred at around 12:30 AM. The rear door is broken from being kicked in and I am wondering if you can get someone here tomorrow to fix or replace the door? Hope to talk to you soon, good bye.”
I immediately called him back and asked for more details regarding the situation. (If they were safe at the moment and he had called the police). The entry occurred at the rear door of the unit. The door was a wooden door with a glass section at the top half, an entry lock and handle in the normal location and a small sliding bolt at the very top of the door. It took the intruder one full body weight push to rip the door jamb apart at the sliding bolt location and push right through the entry lock and he was in. Remarkably, the glass did not break when he blasted through the door. The bastard then went from the rear of the house, where he broke in, to the front of the house and turned on the lights so he could see better around the room and to figure out what he was going to take. He ended up with a lap top and Charles’ wallet.
Next, I asked him what he had done to secure the door and how secure he thought it was. I was trying to determine if they could possibly make it through the night security wise of course knowing that they would not feel entirely safe for quite some time to come. He told me that they had closed the door locked the entry lock again and put a chair up against it. He had also called the property manager for the complex and asked him what he could do about this door issue. The property manager, who seemed to be a little disturbed that he was being called at that hour, offered no assistance and or direction in solving the immediate issue. While the police were there, they told them that it is possible that the intruder may come back now that the door has been busted and he had seen what was in the unit. This straight forward assessment of the truth about these situations must have been very comforting to them. He told me that he thought they would be alright for the rest of the night and we hung up. I could hear in his voice that he did not feel secure and that the situation was not at all comfortable for them.
I lay in the bed for less than 1 minute after the call then said to Meg, “I need to go down there to secure that door and console them if I can.” His parents live in California and hers live in Texas so they have only had the limited amount of community that has been developed through the school, us and one other mutual friend that they could call on for support. Obviously, due to my business and trade and our friendship, I got the call first. I got dressed and starting making a mental list of what I knew I would need to make the door secure for the night. I would work on replacing or having the door replaced in the morning but for now I had to make it secure.
I asked Megan, who knows them as well as I do, from our Landmark Education Wisdom Course, if she wanted to come for support or stay here, as Jasper had not really even fallen asleep yet. He was privy to the phone call and our limited conversations about it and was in the background asking, “Can I come?” So, we loaded him into the back of the new Prius (otherwise known as our new vehicle) along with a 3’ x 5’ piece of plywood two screw guns and some 2 ½” screws and headed down to New Haven.
We called on the way to give them an approximate arrival time and arrived pretty much on schedule. When we got there and knocked on the door Charles asked through the door, “Bill, Is that you?” I went in talked for a few to see how they were, which was naturally really shaken and wired from the incident. Then I quickly made an assessment of the door situation and went to work to secure it for the rest of the late night. I attached the ½ of plywood I had brought with the 2 ½” screws and fastened them through the frame of the door and into the studs beyond the framing to make it as difficult as possible for someone to get through it again. Just in case!
After finishing and explaining to them what I had done, we chatted in the living room for a bit longer and as I was getting ready to leave I told them that we would get a new door taken care of in the morning and we headed back to our luxurious king size bed arriving at about 3:30 AM.
At 4 AM, I received another phone call from Charles. There was a different sense in his voice this time. He was calling to let me know that the arrogant bastard had come back and attempted to break back into the place again by trying to force his way through the plywood that I had just finished installing. In different ways, I’m sure; we were both very satisfied to know that the intruder was unable to gain entry this time as he stood down there repeatedly banging against the old door and its new plywood sheathing.
I went to sleep. I am sure they did not!
The door was replaced the next day with a new solid core solid skin unit and a commercial quality lock system.