During one of those long periods when I had a steady job and was only vaguely aware of what Moki was doing during the daytime, he purchased a small SentrySafe safe and put it under his desk. “We can save all our important documents in case there’s a fire!” Something like that. He never used it like that, in fact we never stored anything at all in there until I found $600 under the seat in front of me on a transcon flight in 2014. We put it in the safe. Locked it? I don’t know. We drew upon this for small purchases, and I sometimes restocked it when I ran a dinner or lunch and Sven or Mike paid up with a lot of greenbacks and I put the do on my credit card. Latterly Moki stored some cheap Chinese tina pipes in there (still there; must dispose of in public bin) around 2019. I suspect this sort of thing was the real end in view when he bought the safe in 2011.
Years pass, and Moki dies, and I can’t figure out how the safe works. With the door open, I try combinations I read about on reddit. They don’t work, and the door locks itself (bolts out). More research: this is apparently a safe that works with a tubular key. You put the key in, turn clockwise to unlock, then do the combination. But where is the key and what is the combination? We had some tubular keys around, a couple that apparently belonged to a long-vanished file cabinet, and another that may go to a bicycle lock. They don’t fit the safe. I worried over this useless safe for a week. Yesterday morning, just as I was coming down with flu-fever, I decided to give up.
This morning I suddenly wanted to sort through Moki’s many folders and manila envelopes of personal papers. And there it is: SentrySafe. Inside, a manual (irrelevant for this model) and a little bubble-wrap bag with two tubular keys.What do you know? They fit. Following the method I read on line of going 0, three turns left to first number, one full turn right to second number, turn left again to final number…and now I move the lever and the thing “opens.” Bolts in. Moki wrote down on the manual that you can just do 53 then 56, but I haven’t the energy for figuring that out today.
I was terribly knocked out by that flu or whatever. Still have mild headache, a sort of sinus headache. Fever went up over 103º, then broke mid-evening and I broke out in sweats. This morning it’s sub-normal, slightly over 98º. I’m weak, a little dizzy, working on my first tea of the day.
Must send that letter out to A.T. With the pic of her parents and the Harvard LS dedication to her father (with A.T. and Ellen Moira in attendance). And another Moki-Mommy print from Falmouth c. 1979.
