The Boy Who Opened the Door
An innocent good deed. Or was it?
When I was a little boy growing up in Brăila, Romania, there was nothing I enjoyed more than exploring places I had never seen before.
Doors, fences, walls, and other obstacles were not necessarily meant to keep us out. Sometimes, they were simply challenges waiting to be overcome.
During one of our visits to Baldovinești, where my father worked at the State Agricultural Farm, I was doing what I did best: wandering around, exploring, and looking for my next adventure.
I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I was a small, skinny boy, probably about the age I appear in an old photograph of my mother, my brother Adi, and me.
That particular day, my explorations took me toward an area with some better-looking buildings. They seemed more important than the surrounding structures, and I assumed they might be offices of some kind.
I was minding my own business when a man called out to me.
He needed help.
Now, I was a very busy young man. I had places to explore, things to discover, and adventures waiting around every corner.
But helping someone was important. So, naturally, I stopped.
The man explained that he worked in one of those buildings but had somehow lost his key. The door was locked, and he couldn’t get inside.
There was, however, an open window with metal bars across it.
Apparently, the man had taken one look at my skinny little body and realized that I might be the solution to his problem.
He asked whether I could climb up, squeeze through the opening, get inside, and unlock the door for him.
To me, this sounded like a perfectly reasonable request.
Coming from Brăila, where we boys had never considered locked doors or security barriers particularly effective at keeping us out of places we wanted to explore, I couldn’t understand why a grown man should be defeated by something as simple as a locked door.
Besides, this was a challenge.
And I liked challenges.
So I got to work.
I climbed up to the window, managed to get through the opening, and found myself inside the building.
Within minutes, I had unlocked the door.
Mission accomplished!
The man was delighted. He thanked me warmly for a job well done, and I walked away feeling rather pleased with myself.
Not only had I overcome an obstacle, but I had also helped a fellow human being in distress.
What a fine young citizen I was!
I continued my explorations, looking for the next interesting thing to do.
But after walking for a while, a thought suddenly occurred to me.
What if that man didn’t actually work there?
I slowed down.
What if he hadn’t lost his key at all?
And then came the really uncomfortable question.
What if he simply wanted to get inside a building where he had absolutely no business being?
Suddenly, my heroic rescue operation began to look a little different.
Had I helped an unfortunate employee who had misplaced his key?
Or had I just helped a complete stranger break into an office?
I had absolutely no idea.
The more I thought about it, the less comfortable I became.
Perhaps I didn’t like where those thoughts were taking me. Perhaps another adventure caught my attention. Whatever the reason, I eventually pushed the whole incident out of my mind.
I never told anyone.
After all, how was I supposed to explain what had happened when I wasn’t even sure whether I had done something good or something terribly wrong?
And so, somewhere in Baldovinești, many years ago, a man gained access to a locked building with the assistance of a very proud little boy.
Whether he belonged there remains a mystery to this day.
But one thing is certain:
If he was looking for an accomplice, he couldn’t have picked a better one.
And if he really had lost his key?
Well, I hope he found it.
Because I certainly wasn’t planning to make a career out of unlocking doors for strangers!
Family photograph: Brăila, Romania, probably early 1960s. My mother with her two sons — me on the left and my older brother Adi on the right — in front of the building where we lived after moving from the Hipodrom neighborhood.
The Owl doesn't forget.