John locked himself in his room last night. He was on a tear yesterday, making messes everywhere he went, calling people, including his beloved babysitter Jennifer, dumber—I have to assume this word is related to the word dumb—and yelling if he didn’t like, for example, the food on his plate at his class’ Thanksgiving lunch. Take it off my plate! Right now! Well, I immediately instituted a rational system for training him to behave better and he was able to control himself. Just kidding! He continued like this for the rest of the day, including a period in the later afternoon where he ran from room to room trying to lock himself in. Jennifer was able to thwart him in this plan for most of the afternoon but didn’t realize that he had a lock on the door to his room, and so while I was making dinner his efforts met with success.

John’s door fits smoothly and almost seamlessly into its frame. The hinges are on the inside, and the only hardware on the outside is a very small, barely attached brass knob, and a tiny keyhole useless because we have no key, because John had stuffed a stick in it, and because in any case it isn’t attached to the lock mechanism. I know how the door locks, it locks on the inside with a tiny button on the bottom of the black box the knob comes through. I was sweet and calm. I spoke to him gently. His big eye looked out at me through the keyhole and my big eye looked back at him. I told him what to do to unlock the door. Instead he rattled the knob. I tried to tell him again. He kept rattling the knob. I said, John, sit on the floor please and look up at the black box on the door and just move that little button over and he said, I want the workmen to come and break down my door. Then I smacked my hand against his door so hard it turned red, frightening him and making him cry.

Then the crazy period began, in which everyone in the house stood outside John’s door and tried to get him to unlock it and he stared at us through the keyhole and jiggled the knob instead.

We called the workmen and Dom, the owner’s father, rushed over to our house with tools and realized that he had to crawl out onto the roof so stepped out onto the roof and broke the screen over John’s window and climbed in and unlocked the door and everyone was happy. There hasn’t been, yet, an appropriate time for me to take John aside to tell him that if he ever pulls a stunt like that again I’m going to kill him.

It’s not that I’m not doing things, I am doing things, I am doing a lot of things, I’m taking trains into the city and ripping my skirt on the arm rest so that my underwear shows and I have to run into a store and buy a new skirt, I’m meeting my youngest sister for dinner and getting schmackled on a bubbly red, I’m walking home from the train station at 11 under a full moon, I’m reading the entire New Yorker in bed in the morning while the men hammer and bang things somewhere else on my house. The house! I’m driving to Stamford to look for wood flooring, I’m agreeing to expensive additional procedures for the renovation, I’m calling the tree man in for a consultation, I’m talking to our contractor about our progress and handing him an enormous check, I am in pursuit of the perfect front door.

I'm reserving a room at a midtown hotel, where I'm planning to meet my husband tonight, I'm holding an appointment for a haircut on Wednesday, before I head to the Open with my father. I’m slowly making my way through Saturday, although it’s overdue, I’m going through the children’s papers for the first day of school, I’m following Gonzales’ resignation, and the arrest of Larry Craig. I'm eating breakfast, and I'm even doing the dishes.

The children are gone, is the dramatic way of saying that they are at their grandparents’, and happy, and that they slept through the night. I had so many things to do in their absence, but I didn’t understand how I would feel, doing them.