One summer day, my father decided it was time to take a look at some projects around the house that he had been putting off for a long while. That was his first mistake. Ever since I could remember our small add-on garage had always stood open to the outside. The reason our garage was open related directly to how the garage doors were hung. Instead of the more common vertical lift design, our garage doors folded open and closed along a horizontal track at the top of the doors.

When the doors were completely open, they folded up tightly on the left and right side of the garage walls. At some point, perhaps before my family even moved into this house, something had gone wrong with the way these horizontal doors slid along their track to accomplish a smooth closure of the garage. Since the doors kept falling off the track or getting stuck partly closed, my parents had decided to leave the doors open all the time. On this fateful day, my father decided to do battle with our garage doors, and he was in no mood to accept defeat.

After several painstaking hours of fighting with the precarious mechanism and working to hang the garage doors properly on their rusty track, my dad performed his final tests to make sure his repairs were sturdy and smooth enough to allow the garage doors to open and close properly once again. Following years of going without being able to close the garage, we were back to normal again, and my dad was quietly and thoroughly proud of himself for completing the hard work without having to buy new doors. My dad felt so good about this accomplishment, he decided to get started on his next project. I cannot remember exactly what he went to work on next, but it might have been along the lines of getting one of our ancient lawn mowers running again without stalling when it encountered a sturdy clump of grass.

Meanwhile, my mother decided to take me and two of my brothers for a ride in the car. Again, I do not remember exactly where we were planning to go, but I do recall that as we prepared to get going, we were stirred up to a pretty good frenzy of excitement about the trip. As my mother fired up the Chevrolet and started backing out of the garage, she did not hear my younger brother telling her that he needed to make sure his car door was shut. My brother opened the car door, which caught on the newly hung garage door, and collided with a loud crashing sound as the garage door was ripped off its track.

Mother reacted as quickly as she could, stopping the car, and pulling forward slightly to dislodge the car door. She knew immediately what had happened, and got busy telling my brother to be more careful about opening the car door when the car was in motion. At that moment, my dad appeared in the driveway to see what was going on. As my mom looked over what damage might have happened to the car door, my dad caught sight of what my brother had done to fix the redone garage door. Dad tossed the hammer he had in his right hand over his shoulder, and slapped his forehead with his left hand.

With a look of total disbelief and frustration on his face, all my dad could say to my mother was, "I just got through fixing that door."

Both my parents knew the destructive power of their children was unintentional. As my mother got back into the car and pulled carefully out into the driveway, I can still remember the look of resignation on my dad's face as he lifted the broken door, and leaned it up against the garage wall.