A Tale of Two Nights

Last week I lost my house key, so whenever no one was home/awake I had to enter the house through the garage. Last Friday night I was out watching movies with friends and didn't get home until about 1:00 a.m., so when I got home I clicked the garage door opener to get inside the garage. I then turned the handle on the door leading from the garage into the house. Locked. Uh-oh.

After a failed brainstorming session, the only way I could think of for getting inside the house was to get on my cell phone and call my sister's land line and have her come down and open the door. I was really reluctant to wake her up but made the call anyways. No answer. Huh.

There was one door in the garage that wasn't locked - the Hacking's Honda Odyssey. So I climbed inside, rolled my coat into a pillow, and scrunched my body across the back seat. I fell asleep pretty quickly, but at 3:30 I woke up because I was a little cold. I remembered that I had a big blanket in the trunk of my car, so I fetched it and went back to sleep in the back of the minivan. My cell phone's alarm clock went off at 7:30, at which time I called my brother-in-law and asked him to unlock the door for me. "Have you been out here all night?" he asked. Yep, I had. I went upstairs, brushed my teeth and changed into my pajamas, and slept for a few more hours in my bed.

This may sound like it was really irritating, but as the whole saga was playing out I thought it was incredibly funny. After all, it was my fault for losing my key and I knew it would be a funny story to tell afterward. It really wasn't that uncomfortable sleeping in the van (although my knees were a little sore since I had to fold my legs up to fit across the tight seat). As I drifted off to sleep in the van I fondly recalled a night I spent curled up in a similar fashion but under very different circumstances.

*****

When I returned to Brazil in 2008 my flight to São Paulo was delayed for about two hours, so by the time I got through immigration and customs it was already about midnight, and then the bus ride to Campinas took another hour and a half. Although I had arranged for a place to stay in Campinas for the rest of the week, I hadn´t been able to find a definite place to stay that first night. I had a guide book that mentioned several hotels close to the bus station in Campinas, so I figured I could just check into a room as soon as I arrived. However, the "hotels" it listed were actually just houses with the word "Hotel" painted on the outside wall where one could rent a vacant bedroom for a night, and they were all dark and gated up for the night.

So I followed the lead of the many homeless people inside the bus terminal and curled up across three hard plastic seats with my head resting on top of my small bag and my arms wrapped tightly around my large backpack. The building had no doors so it was no warmer in there than it was out on the street, but at least inside there were a few security guards wandering around.

The combination of the hard seats jutting into my back, the anxiety that my bags might disappear, and my shivering from the cold night air kept me from getting any real sleep. I just lay there for hours thinking, "Is this the craziest thing I have ever done in my life?" I scrolled through my brain looking at memories from every era of my life and concluded that if this wasn´t the craziest thing I´d ever done, it was definitely near the top.

*****

So, sleeping on the cushy backseat of a minivan inside of a safe garage wasn't bad at all.