The Lunatic Clause

My friend moved into a condominium complex awhile ago. It is the same complex where my husband and I first lived before our family outgrew the place. She was laughing when she read the strata agreement because it contained a clause specifically barring lunatics from living there. That honestly was the actual terminology used in the contract. To help clarify, I was able to explain that the lunatic clause was most likely created after we had moved out, as a preventative measure for any unfortunate incident recurrences.

My excessively hard working husband operates heavy machinery and in the winter plows snow from mountain logging roads. This requires him to leave for work at odd hours, frequently when he is extremely tired and subsequently displaying a similar disposition to that of a rabid wolverine. His sense of humour becomes especially thin when he is looking for things he can’t seem to find, keys, wallet, cap, truck, house, you know, all of those things which are so easily lost. I once suggested installing magnetic door frames so that all of his stuff would be zapped right out of his pockets as he walked through the door and he would know exactly where they were when he next left the house. He refused, but basically the point I am making here is, that unless something is floating in front of his face, at eye level, he seems unable to locate it. Particularly during moments of exhaustion related stress.

One time, during the period when we lived in the condo, he was leaving for work around 1:30 AM, when he realized he didn’t have his truck keys. He did a frantic pat down of all his pockets and then began raging about the house. Each step he took was with an exaggerated stomping as though he were trying to crash through the floor to the crawl space below. He was opening drawers, tossing things aside; searching the fridge, the breadbox, any inanimate object went flying in his frenzied quest for the missing keys. It was as though we had a rather large, very visible poltergeist in the house.

When I mentioned that he might have left the keys in the truck, he was near the point of frothing at the mouth insanity, claiming that I must think he was stupid as he “knew they weren’t in there!”

Finally when the house looked as though it had been hit by rampaging vandals, he charged out to check the truck just so I would know how wrong I was. Well, lo and behold, the keys were in the ignition with the doors locked up tight.

The ensuing spectacle can only be compared to Steve Martin’s parking lot melt down in the movie, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”. If you haven’t seen the movie, get it, if for no other reason than to envision the pandemonium, as lights within the sleeping complex turned on, one by one. Screaming, yelling, kicking at the truck, spinning around in circles and punching at the air, he wound to a grand finale by smashing out the no-draft window on the side of the vehicle, and reaching in to retrieve the errant keys. The next day his brother and business partner, surveying the damage, calmly told him there was a spare key under the bumper and “didn’t he remember that?” Amazingly, no one called the police, instead, I suspect they immediately began writing the now infamous, lunatic clause.