I very much enjoyed biking all over the neighborhoods of Portland, Oregon – nicknaming hills and turning bushes into forts. My parents, five sisters and I lived in a very nice pocket of town. But it was encounters like with the Elmira newspaper that gave me the duh-realization that many children do not grow up fifteen minutes from the heart of a downtown city like Portland, Oregon. And the higher crime rate associated with urban living is not a part of their everyday life.
We locked our doors every night and were careful not to leave anything in our cars that would be appealing to strangers perusing our neighborhood at night. But these things were normal to me as they are to millions of other people living in “the city”. When I was seven, Sister Yeaman’s family van was stolen and driven through the front wing of the high school. The van then erupted into flames. When I was eight my oldest sister Collette, a freshman in high school, went out to the car one morning to find a man sitting in the front seat of our family van, fiddling with the ignition and some wires. I can still remember the loud shriek I heard from my bedroom that morning as my sister ran from our driveway to the inside of our house, yelling “Dad! Someone’s in our car!!” My father ran outside, only to find that the man had already ditched any business he had with our teal Chevy Astro van. And I can still remember the sight of my father driving across the elementary school field in our family van (we shared a fence with the school) searching for the perpetrator.
Growing up I learned that there were necessary precautions one needs to take to protect themselves and their property. Because of this, it probably did not seem odd to me when after dinner one evening, (I was about seven), my mother announced that our family was taking a new safety precaution. This new precaution – which she derived from a parenting book – was essentially “a family word”. This word would enable us kids to know if it was really our mom or dad knocking at the door. Or if someone had to pick us up from school because of an emergency, we could ask for the “secret” word, to make sure they were really sent by my parents and not just someone who we knew but that was also trying to kidnap us. The family word was, Pickle.
My family had no weird fascination with pickles. We had them in tuna sandwiches and on hamburgers but besides that pickles had no prominent place in our lives. That would change.
There were many ideas that were presented that were supposed to beneficiate us as a family but were never implemented. Pickle the family word however, was. It took hold like a strictly enforced policy dealing with national security. (In fact, Pickle was innovative homeland security on my mother’s part).
Scenes like this soon became common:
My mother upon returning home, knocks at the door.
“Who is it?” I ask.
“Mom".
I open the door.
“Why didn’t you ask for the word?!”
“Sorry I forgot”
“Well honey you’ve got to be more careful!”
Or this:
Knock at the door.
“Who is it?”
“Mom and Dad! – Pickle!!”
That six letter word, a green vegetable, a mutated cucumber, suddenly became a prerequisite for opening my front door. This new precautionary policy had taken hold. Like most policies however, public perception of the policy began to change from the time that it was first introduced.
See basically the only times that my mother would knock on the door was when her hands were full or when she was extremely preoccupied. So scenes like this became very common,
Knock at the door,
Knock again.
“Pickle! It’s Mom! Hurry open the door! Pickle!”
Suddenly the meaning of pickle had changed. Yes it still meant that the person at the door was family (hopefully unarmed, but family nonetheless) but the word pickle acquired an added and more important meaning: whoever was at the door needed you to come quick. They were most-likely stressed out because they were in a hurry - probably trying to juggle two milk cartons, a veggie platter, three grocery bags and a diet coke, and they were using all the effort they could to make a poke at the doorbell, so you had better hurry.
“Pickle” became the call of urgency, which probably explains my mom’s use of it at a public event that my sister Collette recently recounted to me. My mom was trying to get Collette’s attention and Collette was ignoring her.
“Collette!” My mom whispered.
“Collette,”
“Collette, Pickle!”
Collette turned towards her, probably intrigued and slightly embarrassed as to why she felt the need to use “Pickle” in such a public setting.
“Pull up your shirt, I can see your cleavage”, my mom whispered to my sister.
Yes, Pickle had found its place in our family.
Somewhere between grade school and my entrance into middle school, Pickle had disappeared. I mean we still used pickles at meals occasionally, but its force as an urgency-indicator and safety precaution had withered.
Someday, I secretly hope that confidential information will need to be passed to me by one of my family members. And it would be such a high-stakes occurrence that I would have to verify my identity. In such a moment I would say one word. “Pickle”. It would leave no question to my identity.
