My Sister's Drawer

When I was 12, my older sister had a room of her own. My younger brother and I made it our avocation to torment her. We put tiny Radio Shack speakers under her bed and wired them to a microphone in our room, so that we could make spooky sounds and frighten her in the night. The speakers were so small, she never heard anything, but we felt devious nonetheless.

I was at that awkward age when nothing fit. Even the teeth in my mouth. They were what could be called "buck-teeth". And so my parents had the foresight of taking me to an orthodontist. He decided that the only way to rein in those buck-teeth was with a head gear. You’ve seen them: a wire apparatus that fits into the mouth and then connects to a headband around the back of the neck. I was supposed to wear it all the time. But sometimes in the middle of the night it would come unhinged from one of its rubber bands and go flying across the room.

One night when my parents were having a dinner party, and my sister had joined them in the dining room, I decided it was time to explore the locked drawer in her dresser. I had no idea what the drawer contained. But it was locked, so its contents must have been juicy. I decided that my headgear was the perfect device to pick the lock. I inserted the curved end of the wire apparatus into the keyhole of the drawer and twisted it to the right, then to the left. The drawer was not unlocked, but my headgear was stuck. I tried every way of removing it short of wire clippers. Finally when the MacGyver excitement was too much for me, I crept into the dinner party and whispered in my dad’s ear. He quietly rose from the table and walked the length of the house to my sister’s bedroom. Of course everyone else at the table also rose and followed. I stood red faced in front of the room full of people as my dad extracted my headgear from the lock. “Shall we finish our dinner?” And he escorted the crowd back to the table.

Dad never said anything about the incident to me. He never had to. My future as a professional thief had been thwarted forever.