Michael D. Davis.

We don’t answer the door at my house. It’s not a thing, it’s never been a thing. If you come by my house and ring the doorbell expect nothing because that’s what you’ll get. Actually, just don’t come by.

I don’t know about other places, but it’s always been this way at my house. The doorbell rings or there comes a knock at the door, everyone freezes. Lamps darken, TVs mute, and everyone sits around waiting for the sound of a car driving away. If you talked it was standard custom to be aggressively shushed with a Kleenex box hurtled your way.

Rarely anything good comes from an unexpected knock on the door. Ed McHamon has never shown up at my place with an oversized check, that’s for sure. If people persist, we have four lines of defense, or tiers of aggressiveness, because we all answer the door differently. The most feared among us is Ma. If it gets to the point where Ma has to go to the door there’s no use in running, you won’t make it to the end of the sidewalk, and you won’t be knocking again. If my Father is a trained guard dog (which is a generous metaphor), then my Ma is a lion.

The Old One is the next tier down. My Father has run off a person or two, but it’s not his strength. Then you got my sister. She is not inclined to answer the door mostly because she does not care. However, don’t underestimate her. Yelling at kids to get off our lawn is one of my sister’s favorite summer pastimes.

I’ve put myself at the bottom of this list because it seems there are two schools of thought when it comes to me. Some people see a fat guy dressed in all back and find me intimidating. Others see a panda bear. It’s a paradox that has followed me around for ages.

So when it comes to running off the people that come to our door it’s a mixed bag of results. For the longest time, I would open the front door while holding a baseball bat. Some found it intimidating, a couple of church ladies did. Then there was also the time I opened the door with the bat only to see the mail lady and involuntarily screamed a little. I won’t get into that.

I don’t believe anyone in my family has ever said, “You know who it would be nice to come over and visit?” We don’t do that. I have known people for 20 years, that have been to my house multiple times, but not inside it.

Collectively, as a family, we don’t care for that. It is so ingrained in my head not to let anyone in the house that once I was home alone having an asthma attack severe enough to warrant an ambulance call, and I walked outside to wait for the ambulance.

For the longest time, when there was someone at the door, someone would have to creep through the house to one of the two windows that looked out front to see who it was. This hardly ever worked, though. Firstly, you had to pick one of two rooms to peek out of and one of them is my sister’s room. I don’t care who is knocking, it is nearly never worth going into enemy territory.

The second thing is we have a large thatch of lilac bushes that block 80 percent of the view from both windows. So, when you did peek, you had to piece things together to figure out who it was. Can you gauge their height? Did they drive or walk? What kind of car do they have?

Now, we have a camera. It makes it so much easier to figure out who we are avoiding with a camera. The other day someone came and banged his fist on the door for several minutes. Ma was home, she didn’t answer. I was home later and the guy returned repeating his action. I took a picture with the front door camera and no one in the family knew who it was.

That night my father said to my Ma, “I was gonna go do things tomorrow, but if you want me to stick around if that guy returns.” He both was not technically offering and was displaying a thin layer of bravado equal to that of Fred from Scooby-Doo.

Ma said no, unsure of how The Old One’s watching of the History channel and napping would deter strangers from the door. The guy didn’t return, but I’m sure if he did Ma could have handled him. At the very least, I could have answered the door with the bat and inadvertently screamed, it freaked out the mail lady, good enough.