“I wonder how much air is in there and how long it will last…”

It all started innocently enough. The children were playing happily on a rainy Otago winter’s afternoon. Lego’s possibilities had been thoroughly explored. A game of Monopoly Jr. (with teams to include the youngest members) had been played. Big boys had swung little boys in nausea inducing merry-go-round circles, and the mini-men had been reduced to a game of chase on the hardwood floors of the old courthouse building that my childhood friend calls home.

Linda was my favourite babysitter as a child. In fact, Josh and I would intentionally misbehave and mutiny if anyone but Linda was engaged to mind us. She was also my first piano teacher when she was about the age that Hannah is now. She, too, flew the coop far and wide and spent years teaching in Singapore, hooked up with a Kiwi, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Her daughter is a freckle faced reflection of her mama: long, thick, red hair and the cutest upturned nose. She stood on a chair and carefully washed each lettuce leaf for the salad, proud to have been declared the sous-chef, as I worked on dinner. Linda and I chatted. The guys did whatever guys do while the women are cooking. Hannah picked away at the piano. The boys burned off steam in a room where a solemn faced judge once presided over the lawless wild-west of NZ during its gold boom, a hundred or so years ago.

I’m not really sure how Ezra gets himself into these fixes, but clearly, this time, he was not alone; because it’s physically impossible to get oneself locked into an 1800’s era bank safe without accomplices.

I imagine he’s not the first young man with a criminal bent to get himself slammed into a safe in the midst of some hijinx, but he is certainly the first in our gene pool.

The other participants were not quick to point out their roles in the heist, but they were quick to point out that he was in the safe. I suppose there is some redemption in that… in not having left him to cool his heels for a half an hour first. The safe has thick walls. It tempers the sound somewhat. Ez can be noisy.

“Umm… Mom… Ez is locked in the safe…”

Gabe reported with that half amused, half afraid face he gets when he’s not sure if he’s delivering a joke or his own damnation.

I laughed and returned to stirring my pot.

Linda got that look moms sometimes get where one eye is wider than the other and a risk-assessment is underway.

“No, really. Mom. Ezra is locked in the old bank safe. We can’t get him out!”

I sighed. Linda yelled for Mark, and, leaving the pasta to mind itself, we moved the party to the old judge’s chambers.

“I’m okay Mom! The light is on! It’s fine!” I hear Ez cheerfully reassure us.

Linda (who is less familiar with this child’s perpetual parade of perilous positionings (four points for alliteration!) was hyperventilating just a little.

Mark went to the shed for a spade.

Tony appeared with a crow bar.

I did the mental calculation of the size of the interior space and the amount of time the O2 would hold out before we had a real emergency on our hands.

Linda muttered, “Well if this doesn’t work the next call is to the fire department.”

I sent Hannah to serve dinner to the young kids and hollered through the thick metal door to Ez that he shouldn’t worry, the prodigious banging was just Daddy working on the door with a crowbar.

Then, someone shut off the light.

“HEY!” Ez crowed… “THE LIGHT!”

I suppose the interior of a safe gets rather dark, especially to a ten year old, alone, who can only hear his Dad banging on the outside.

We flipped the switch.

“Thank you!” His cheerful tone returned. To Ezra, this was just one in a long string of adventures. We’ll add it to him melting his eyebrows off in Guatemala and setting a fishhook in his foot in Thailand and pooping to death on chicken buses.

This is the kind of mayhem this kid lives for

Or so it seems.

Needless to say, we sprung him. The crowbar and the spade popped the door (the actual lock was long since removed.) Dinner was not ruined, and the walls of the old court chuckled as one more drama unfolded. One, I suspect that the old judge could never have envisioned in a million years… unless, of course, he raised boys.