Unlike a lot of the biases in this series, I know this bias is irrational, neighborly and unfair. However, I just can’t shake it. My first instinct, always, when I hear a knock on the door (I disconnected the door bell long ago when it kept going off on its own) is some mixture of anger, annoyance, and dread.
The bias became full blown when a large female Alzheimer patient startled Grace and I awake one morning shortly after we were married by banging on our front door while roaring angry gibberish. It turned out she had wandered off from a facility and thought she lived here. Four police officers had a hard time corralling her. Long before that, though, my mother had poisoned me against the whole concept of surprise visitors: she distrusted them. Then there was that mentally ill guy with an old Weimeraner on a leash who would knock on our door in Arlington, Mass. still thinking he was an air raid warden and that it was World War II. I remember that he had clear blue eyes, dead eyes, like a zombie. This was before I had ever encountered Jehovah’s Witnesses, kids selling magazines to pay for a trip to Disney World, and Comcast salesmen.
And before I had watched so many home-invasion movies.
