Cheers!

One summer when my kids were young I wanted to get season passes to White Water for the three of us but it was one of those times that we were closer to poor than rich and the $60  that they would cost was not in the budget.

I began searching for a way to come up with the money. Nobody was buying gold jewelry back then, even if I had had any.  If I got some kind of job for the summer it would defeat the purpose, when would we use the passes?  And I was afraid to go to the parts of town where I could sell my blood, though I did think about it.  (What can I say, I have a fertile imagination.)

Then, in the newspaper, I saw the answer to my prayers.  Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center was conducting a study and they would pay you if you participated!  Weird, maybe but not as gory as selling blood.  I called them and they accepted me.  It was a study of the effects of alcohol on the brain. I assured  them I did have a brain. It did not have alcohol on it.  I would be in the control group. (I know what you're thinking but the possibility of being in the other group didn't even come up!  I don't like the taste of it, anyway.)

Now, doing something weird, like being a guinea pig, and looking like you are going to do something weird are two different things.  I was going to a university campus. I would look the part. When I was in college we wore plaid skirts, white  shirts and knee socks. (Stop smirking! We were the good guys during the sixties)  That probably wouldn't work even if I could fit into one of those skirts anymore. I decided to go for the college professor look. Blazer, plaid skirt (I used the rubber band trick) white blouse and panty hose. (So, maybe I hadn't seen a college professor in a few years.  I had seen plenty of black and white college movies on TV)  I ditched my contacts for my glasses.  Tried a pencil behind my ear but it may have been a bit much.  I looked very intelligent.

They should have given points just for locating the place in the maze of buildings there at OU Health Center and finding a place to park, but after walking thirteen and a half miles or so, looking like a lost, absent-minded professor, I finally located the building I was searching for.  I approached a white-coated lady sitting at a desk.  She looked over her college professor glasses at me.  She didn't seem to think I was an Intelligent Colleague. "Please fill out this form," she whispered. "Dr. Basin will come to get you when you are finished."

I took the ream of paper from her and sat down to fill in the blanks. They wanted information going back beyond my childhood clear into the womb.  They wanted to know my genealogy.  They wanted to know my lifestyle and habits.  They wanted to know what I had for breakfast. They wanted to know the last time I had a drink containing alcohol--in weeks. Math! There went the Intelligent card. I was about to flunk the test and it hadn't even started. There were no calculators in sight.  Okay, I can do this. There are fifty-two weeks in a year. Josh is eleven, but his birthday was a month or two ago.  I was pregnant nine months.  But he was ten days late.  But I didn't know I was pregnant at first. But I didn't like the taste anyway. I wrote down 626 weeks.

Dr. Basin came to get me.  She wore a long white coat.  She didn't  seem to think I was an Intelligent Colleague either. Why hadn't I thought about the white coat bit? She said, "My, my.  Six hundred and twenty six weeks!" There was a long written test, the "if train A leaves the station at 5:42 a.m. and train B leaves LaGuardia airport on Tuesday, what will be the overtime collected by the conductors on board?" type of test.  I was hopeless at those when I was in school and twenty years later, things did not look any more promising.  I thought of water slides and the Lazy River ride and persevered. I had no more than half a page finished when a bell rang.  "Pencil down, please." No one met my eyes when they took me to the next cubicle.

The next twenty-eight, okay, maybe two, hours were filled with flash cards, matching pictures, sorting the flash cards into groups, matching more pictures.  Dr. Basin had the voice of a computerized recording. "Which is the same?  Which is different?  Is this better?  Or this?"  I thought nodding off might make them question which group I was supposed to be in. I fought it off. Three days, okay maybe two hours later, someone said  "Next cubicle, please."

The next cubicle was a darkened room where an attendant fitted my head with a flexible salad colander. Or something like it. They attached electrodes all over my head, but first squirted the holes of the colander with something squishy. I answered the same questions, but this time sitting in sort of a flight simulator. "Push the red button when the light flashes." I managed not to nod off one more time.

Finally I stumbled down the hall, picked up an envelope with my hard-earned $60 and went out to search for my car,  KY jelly glistening all over my head.  Several white-coated people passed me.  I nodded in my professorial way but they didn't nod back.

About a week later, while floating down the Lazy River at White Water, it dawned on me.  If they didn't succeed in driving me to drink that day, I must have passed the test.

Searching for Kevin

Sometimes you search all your life for that Perfect One; it seems that you are destined to spend your life seeking but never finding.  I had almost given up trying, after having many short relationships with a variety of people but then, in the Autumn of my life, against all odds, I found Kevin. Kevin set me free. He freed me from blow dryers, he freed me from hot rollers, he freed me from helmet hair. He is the hairdresser I always wanted but never found. Till now.

 "Start with a  good haircut", all the magazines and TV shows say. Yeah, right. They don't tell you how to find one, short of spending $14,000 to fly to New York and getting an appointment, if any are available before June 17, 2024, with the Hairdresser du Jour.  If you pass the stare test and are admitted to the inner sanctum, he is likely to take a fist full of your hair, roll his eyes and turn you over to the assistant to his assistant who will slice and dice and send you out the door looking like a cockatoo. In molt.

My first hairdresser was my mom, Esther Scissorhands.  She  decided she needed to cut my bangs. They weren't quite even. They were a little short on the left.  No, now it's the right. Now, the left, now the right.   Cut, repeat, cut, repeat.   By the time she gave up I had a tiny fringe sticking out from my hairline closely resembling the bristles on a toothbrush. When that finally grew out she did it again. And you wondered what was the trauma that shaped my young life to this weird skew.

Here is a handy hint: If you feel you must cut the bangs of a child, take Scotch tape, position it at the bottom of where you want to cut, then cut along the top edge of the tape.  The line will be straight and the hair will fall off in one piece, stuck to the tape, not the child's face.

Through the years I have had lots of haircuts/styles.  How did I wear thee? Let me count the ways: the Artichoke, the Beehive, the French Twist, the Wedge, the Page Boy, the Flip, the Shag, the Feather, the Farrah, Too Short, Too Long.  I've used juice cans (yes, empty ones, smart alec!) to get big curls and the ironing board and iron to get straight hair, but was saved from the Mullet since my brother once said "Your ears make you look like a taxi going down the street with both doors open".

Best of all, there was the Toni Home Permanent. My mom or her friend took hours twisting my hair onto pink plastic permanent rods that looked like tiny medieval torture instruments, then a noxious liquid was poured over my head and left to dry for, I don't know, a day and a half.  Even after the ordeal was over the acrid smell would linger. My mom said "Just sit in the back at church so nobody can smell you.", thus the origin of the term "Back Seat Baptist."  That was easy because nobody wanted to sit next to me. My friends waved from across the room and said "Oh, you got a perm." For some reason their noses were wrinkled but they didn't come any closer. And, oh, yes. I looked like I had stuck my finger in a light socket and my hair was trying to fight it's way off my head.  Think Albert Einstein with spiral curls.

When I began working and could afford to go to a real hairdresser I went all the way. I had a Standing Appointment.  This meant that every Wednesday after work I went to the salon, had my hair washed and set on bristly curlers, then I sat under a big hooded hair dryer where I shared intimate secrets with the other Standings in the shop WITH A VOICE LIKE THIS until the hairdresser deemed my hair dry enough to tease to the volume of a hot air balloon.  From Wednesday night till the next Wednesday morning I slept with a silk headscarf tied under my chin.  Had there been a hurricane evacuation, I was ready to go.  This was supposed to keep my curls in place along with a can and a half of hairspray every morning.

Over the years  hairstyles became a tiny bit more relaxed.  We saved a lot of money on hairspray and I mostly did my hair myself.  It still had to be cut occasionally, though, and I continued my lifelong search for A Good Haircut.  When styles changed, I went from hood dryers to blow dryers, from bristle rollers to hot rollers, from salon to salon seeking the Holy Grail of haircuts. Sometimes it was a little scary, like when I went into a new salon in Oklahoma City and every hairdresser at every station was sporting some version of a Mohawk, or a spike. Blue was the dominant color, and we're not talking that little old lady blue rinse. "Please," I begged. I'm fortyish. I'm a mom. Take pity on me." Somebody in there remembered how to do mom hair and I escaped relatively unscathed.
 
By the time we moved to Tulsa I had almost given up.  And then one day I went to Reasor's for groceries. I saw a lady with great looking hair. I stalked her through the produce department to the dairy to the frozen foods, gathering up my courage to approach her.  Finally, I casually parked my grocery cart in front of hers penning her up against the pizza freezer and popped the question.  "Do you mind telling me where you get your hair done?"

"Kevin", she said.  "The Cutting Room. It's at 81st and Memorial.  I think you would like him."  And a dream became reality.

Once a month for eight years Kevin has been the other man in my life . I have found out he is so much more than a hairdresser.  He's not just a stylist, he is a Renaissance Man.  He has walked me through renovations on my house, he knows tiling, painting, gardening, sheet rock, plumbing and more than once offered to come help me get through the mess I had gotten myself into in my DIY remodeling. He knows where all the good buys in town are and who the good doctors and carpenters are.  Most of the them are his clients along with judges, lawyers and little old ladies like me.  When it looked like I might have chemo treatments that would make my hair fall out he reached out to me.  He said "If that happens, I will come to you wherever you are and I will be the one to shave your head. You won't go through that without me." That is not just a hairdresser, it is a true friend.

So Jody cut my hair a couple of weeks ago. They had called from his salon and told me Kevin had had a serious medical emergency. I is in the hospital.  I took her a picture of  the way Kevin cuts it and begged her to try to do the same thing.  She did a pretty good job and said she just followed the lines that Kevin had cut.  I'm hoping Kevin will be back to work by the next time I go but I don't know. I'll wait for him, though, I waited all these years, I can wait a little longer.

Dennis's Most Embarrassing Moment

In honor of our 45th anniversary on September 3rd, I give you Dennis's Most Embarrassing Moment.

First, you must come with us to our teeny-tiny Smurf-sized apartment in Married Students' Housing at Truman State University.  We had the corner unit: living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath.  The whole apartment would comfortably fit into a two-car garage with room for a patio and cute front yard to spare, neither of which we had.

It was furnished, in a way.  There was a small sofa bed, an arm chair, a kitchen table so small it could hold a Monopoly board but not the money, two kitchen chairs, a dresser and a bed, and a box we used for a nightstand.  The double bed filled the room almost wall to wall.  To get in and out you had to scoot sideways between the bed and the wall. The bedroom had no overhead light but we had one lamp with a broken switch whose cord we plugged in and out of the wall to turn it off and on and it sat on the box.  They didn't have RVs back then but if they had they would have been considered luxury apartments compared to #3 Fair Apartments.

You can see why I sat in the floor and cried the first time I saw it when my mom, my sister and I drove to Kirksville, Missouri to check it out  the week before our wedding.  I really, really cried when I was sweeping up and found the clippings from a man's toenails on the floor in the bedroom.  My mom said "At least you know the people who lived here before you had clean feet."  Thanks, Mom, that helped a lot.

Young love conquers all, though, and we moved in and started college, Dennis's senior year and my freshman. It was blissful. We settled into "Married People" routine.

Back in the olden days,---some of you may find this totally unbelievable but it is true---colleges had mens' and womens' dorms and the women had a curfew after which the doors were locked and the dorm mother had to be awakened to let a girl in if her roommates had not loosened a window screen so she could sneak in.  There were penalties for missing curfew, like having to go three days without washing your hair or having to shave your legs in public or something. (I don't know! I never lived in a dorm. I got married too young) At any rate, about fifteen minutes before dorm hours there was a great gathering in front of the womens' dorm like the swallows returning to Capistrano, with couples billing and cooing and pledging their undying love until tomorrow night or their eight a.m. classes whichever they woke up for first.

Our bedroom window faced the girls dorm with The Green, like a wide lawn, between us.  People also seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time walking up and down the sidewalk outside our window just before curfew and had I known anything about walk-up windows I could have made a tidy sum of money selling breath freshener and/or lip gloss to them.

The evening in question Dennis and I had already gone to bed, being old married people and not having to try to stay awake to keep dorm hours, but because of the gathering outside our window we were not yet asleep, in fact had not yet unplugged our lamp. The interior decorators who had furnished our lovely apartment had failed to see the need for anything frou-frou like curtains in the bedroom but we did have window shades, the pull down kind on a spring which never seemed to pull quite to the level you wanted, always either too long or too short.

We were lying in bed and I noticed that the shade was about three inches above the windowsill.  Had someone squatted down they could have peered in since the windowsill was right at the level of the bed, about knee height. In fact, I could see people's knees as they walked by. This would not do!  Ever gallant, my new husband took charge, scooting sideways down the wall to the end of the bed, then sideways up the other side of the bed to reach the window.

Now, how should I put this delicately? Umm...His night attire was, shall I say?...non-existant. (The term "naked as a jay-bird" comes to mind, but I don't know what a jay-bird is) He reached for the window shade.  He grasped it in his hand.  He almost had it.  SPROING!!!  The window shade flew up, spinning itself around and around the dowels and springs at the top and Dennis was highlighted in the window for all to see.  They even quit kissing each other to have a better view.

He stood there for a moment, stunned. He tried to scoot back down the length of the bed to a point where he could move. He scooted, then twisted, then scooted. The more he  scooted, the more he was stuck, and the more he twisted, the better the show for his impromptu audience.  I dove across the bed, knocking over the lamp, desperately trying to find the cord to unplug it, and finally plunged the room into darkness.  There was a moment of silence, then thunderous applause. The Embarrassing Moment of the Century was born for Dennis. 

Silver Hair at the Golden Arches

Is it a bad thing when the girl who works at McDonald's knows what you are going to order and has your large Coke cup and a senior coffee with two creams, four Splenda already on the tray by the time you get from the parking lot to the door? It's not like we go there every single day for breakfast. Well, maybe every other day.

We are not the only ones who do this. We see lots of the same people when we are there. They nod, we nod and some of us chat like old friends. There is one gentleman, Everett, who---I am not making this up---eats every meal of every day at McDonald's and has been doing it for years.  He was there when the snow was twelve inches deep this winter.  He was there when the temperature was 112 degrees this summer.  Eva, his wife, said that even if there is a family BBQ or birthday dinner, he will go to the celebration but he won't eat there. He goes later to McDonald's. One would worry about his health except for one little detail.  He is 84 years old and appears to be as fit as a kid of fifty.

I don't think I could quite do that. There was a time when the grandkids were younger that I was so sick of McDonald's cheeseburgers that I never wanted to ever see one again, much less eat it.  I wouldn't say we ate there a lot but Miranda did collect every one of the thirty-two Build-a-Bears when they were in the Happy Meals. And now we have almost all the Smurfs on the list. In the past if I was keeping multiple grandkids for the day I may have been known to go early in the morning to the Playground McDonald's, get them breakfast and let them play till they started serving the Happy Meals for lunch.   It beats being outside in the heat or cold.  They thought it was a great treat and I read a book while they played. Sadly, they are one by one, getting too big for the playground.

If you are in a hurry and running between school and ball games and dance class and trying to get everything done at once you may have to resort to going through  the drive-through, here is tip: when you are planning errands and have both the drive-through and filling up your car with gas on the same list, it is always a good idea to do the fill-up thing first.  It may be a little embarrassing to run out of gas right in front of the pick-up window and cars are piling up behind you and people start to get really impatient and then they start to honk and the McDonald's people finally take some teen-age boys off flipping burger duty to come out and push your car past the window and everybody gives you a dirty look as they drive by because they had to wait and you have to walk along a busy street to the gas station holding onto your three-year-old's hand and carrying your one-year-old and not drop the Happy Meals. Just sayin'.

Sometimes it is a little frazzling to try to give your order to the disembodied voice coming through the microphone when all you hear from it is static and every kid in the car is telling you at once which kind of Happy Meal he wants and be sure to tell them a boy toy this time and not one of those stupid Hello Kitty things and you are saying "We don't say 'Stupid' in this family, young man!" just as the voice in the box chirps "mumble, mumble, mumble Mango Pineapple Smoothie with Yogurt with that today?"  I have never, though, gone so far as my sister did once when she ordered "Two Big Macs, a medium fries and two large Diet Cokes, please" into the chute of the trash can that is along the side of the drive-through lane. You have to wait a really long time to get your food if you do that.

Ordering at the counter has it's own perils, however.  Like the time I was distractedly waiting for my hamburger minus the pickles and onions (it always takes longer for a "special order") and mindlessly eating french fries while I stood there, which I often do.  I should order extra fries to tide me over.  Except this time when I looked down to reach for more I noticed I was eating french fries from someone else's tray.  I didn't have a tray yet. The owner of the fries was just standing there watching me eat his food and didn't seem to want to wait for me replace them for him when my own fries came, although I did offer.

Unless we have the grandkids with us we tend to stick to breakfast at McDonald's these days.  Their biscuits and gravy are better than I make, and you can refill your Coke and coffee (senior coffee: 38 cents, what a deal!) as much as you want.  Besides, they know us there.

Sophisticated Lady

Back in the eighties, (no, not the eighteen-eighties, smart alec!) when men were men and women wore shoulder pads, I went to work, after fifteen years as a stay-at-home mom, as a salesperson at a high-end furniture and design store in Northwest Oklahoma City. "High-end" meant that most of the furniture was expensive and the customers who came in to buy it were on the expensive side too. And sophisticated.

 My mom-clothes were a little less than sophisticated though, so my  friend, Fran came to my rescue once again. We went through her closet and she gave me a lot of her things and I adapted some of my clothes in various ways.  Did you know you can buy shoulder pads separately and move them in and out of different clothes for a sophisticated look?

My boss, I later learned, had hired me not only because of my---ahem---great sales ability but because he was impressed by my obvious sophistication:  I had worn a business suit to the interview (Fran's). It had shoulder pads.  I later found out that he almost always hired anyone who came to an interview wearing a business suit. There was, however, one little detail I neglected to mention to him at the time.  I barely knew the difference between a lounge chair and a lawn chair.

 My first day, my first customer: " I'm interested in seeing some wing chairs with cabriole legs." Me, sophisticatedly: "Certainly, right this way."  I let her go first. When she stopped at a chair with curvy legs I figured maybe that was it so I showed her all the other chairs with curvy legs and when she found one she liked I sold it to her. Hey, I might not have known furniture but I did know how to sell!

One key factor in selling is to establish rapport with your customer and maintain eye contact.  In a furniture store that means when they sit on a sofa or chair you sit down also, when they stand you stand. You do so in an elegant fashion  There are a lot of ups and downs.  The exception to this is mattresses.  Of course they have to lie down on the mattress to try it out  but this is not the time to lie down with them and take a nap. That is not sophisticated. To keep myself awake when the customer was lying there I would hop up onto the mattress in a sophisticated manner (Stop rolling your eyes!. It was twenty years and forty pounds ago. I could hop back then) and walk elegantly back and forth.  Mrs. Jones did not roll over toward me or bounce up and down.  She could imagine that portly ol' Mr. Jones could flop back and forth trying to get his nose to drain on both sides all night long and maybe she could still get a decent night sleep.  Sold!   After the first time I did this I decided to ditch the business suit with skirt and make sophisticated pants suits my everyday uniform. With shoulder pads.

I was particularly grateful to be wearing pants the day my customer stopped in Children's Furniture to look at bunk beds.  Bunk beds don't have box springs. They have something called a Bunkie board and if someone, like the kid whose job it is to move furniture around, neglects to put the Bunkie board under the mattress and someone sits down on that mattress, CRASH! the mattress will tip and that someone will be down inside the bed frame with both her legs sticking up and her arms twisted under her and her rear end stuck between the slats. The sophistication meter would be decidedly low. It would take both the customer and the kid who moved furniture around to pull me, I mean, that someone, out. I don't think that customer bought the bunk beds.  I kind of think he was exhausted after that and said he'd send his wife back in.

In spite of my bed hopping--does that sound right?--I always maintained a professional image.  Sophisticated customers expect and appreciate that. Imagine my surprise, then, when I was writing a sales ticket one day and felt something sliding down my arm. I looked down just as my shoulder pad fell out of my sleeve onto the counter coming to a stop right in front of the customer.  I didn't recall anything in The Sophisticate's Guide to the Universe handbook for this particular situation.  It was past the point of pretending not to see it.  It lay there looking like a gelatinous lump of mashed potatoes in a satin case. What else was there to do?  I  picked it up, pinkie finger extended in an elegant manner and slid it into my pocket. Then I hunched my shoulder up to compensate for the loss on that side and said "What day would you like this delivered?"

Sophistication just comes naturally so some people, I guess. With or without shoulder pads.

Dine At Your Own Risk

There was some discussion on Facebook the other day about people letting their children run wild in restaurants, which is dangerous for the kids who might be tripped over by big people carrying trays of hot food, and so annoying to other diners that they may be secretly hoping for those trays of hot food to crash down on the little darlings' heads.

I want to go on record that I have never let my children or grandchildren run around and terrorize the waiters or diners in a restaurant.  We did it sitting down.

Remember Furr's Cafeteria?  It was one of our favorites when my boys were growing up.  You know you will probably not find starched tablecloths on the tables when there are high chairs on wheels at the entrance, so it would seem to be an appropriate place to take children.  But high chairs don't contain everything, now do they?  Like the time two-year-old Jake, having finished eating his ear of corn, and wanting a neat tray, of course, tossed the cob over his shoulder (No, that's not the way we did it at home!) and it landed in the plate of the lady sitting three booths over.  (He was always an athletic kid) Or when he spotted Dennis leaving the restroom there and yelled at the top of his lungs across the room, "Did you go potty, Daddy?"  But he wasn't running around endangering wait staff when he did those things.

Of course, McDonalds is the quintessential kids' place to eat, but in the past they did not have playgrounds in them.  Once when the kids were a little older and we were visiting friends in California, we stopped at a McDonalds and let them sit at a booth by themselves while we talked.  It's possible that  my friend, Darlene and I were enjoying ourselves a little too long and were too absorbed with catching up on each other's lives. And it's possible that when we heard some ladies in another booth speaking in the authoritative tone of the childless everywhere, "If I ever have children they will never act like brats in a restaurant, you can be sure of that!", it may have been directed specifically at us even though they were the ones not using their indoor voices.  The kids were being quiet, which should have been the clue, of course.

We looked toward the booth where are children were ensconced only to be amazed at the sight of a giant replica of the St. Louis Gateway Arch fashioned from soda straws rising toward the ceiling, reaching from their booth to the soft drink dispenser on the other side of the room. It was actually quite a marvelous feat of engineering  and though our hearts swelled with pride it was obviously time to take our burgeoning architects out of there.

We waited till the busybodies, excuse me, concerned citizens, left and then we tried to sneak, unnoticed, out to our car. We thought that the kids seemed to be suitably chastised.  That is until we were walking behind them in the parking lot and noticed that the back pockets of each of their jeans sported a wad of straws  the size of a Duraflame log.  I don't know what else they were planning to build but we made them take them back.

We've never actually been so annoying that other people got up and left. Okay, there was that one time we were all on one of our road trips to St. Louis. The children were totally grown!  You would think you wouldn't have that much to worry about. However, someone in the group, I believe it was Dennis, in fact, the patriarch who should have been setting the example, who was stacking those little cream containers one on top of the other, higher and higher, the kids all cheering him on, to a height never before achieved.  All of a sudden someone, who it was remains a mystery, flipped the bottom carton and one sailed up, up, up into the air and plopped into the plate of some innocent travelers who were trying to enjoy their lunch across the room.  I don't think it was even the flying missile that made them get up and change tables.  It was more likely the ear-splitting, falling out of the chair laughter, so loud that it precluded conversation by anyone within close proximity, that did the deed.  We didn't ask.

Jake's children, of course, are much better behaved than he was.  Except for the things he himself is teaching them.  He didn't learn it from me but he can shoot the paper off a straw quite a distance.  That athleticism, you know.  Like the time we were sitting in Braum's----we only do these things in kid-friendly places----when his daughter shot a straw paper like an arrow and it landed on the head of the man who was sitting behind us. And stayed. Black hair, white straw, lots of hairspray. We held our breath. We waited and waited for it to fall off. Should we mention it or not? Should we, and by we, I mean Jake, go over and apologize? The man was eating alone so there was no one to point it out to him. It stayed on his head.  We watched it stay on his head. He finished his food.  It was still on his head.  Ah, but for the Oklahoma wind as he got up to leave, it may have still been on his head when he laid it on his pillow that night.

I'm beginning to think the drive-through window may be the best option for our  family. We could have a whole meal with everyone buckled into their seats for safety.  The safety of other diners, that is.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

It was dark as we drove down the lane toward our house one Sunday evening after church. An eerie stillness filled the air, strange for Oklahoma, where the wind usually comes sweeping down the plain. There was something---not quite right about things.

Wait, there it was!  The door, the garage door, stood open like a great, gaping maw ready to swallow anything that came near. The light, the friendly overhead light that normally accompanied the door when it was open, was shuttered and cold.  It did not greet us with it's warm glow.  Hmmm.....I was sure I had closed that door when I left. Could it be that the door had betrayed us and opened for someone other than it's little family?

I stopped the car in the driveway, unwilling to enter that black hole. And yet, it was my home. I should not be afraid. I should be bold. I should go forth. I should be brave, as an example for my offspring still in the waiting vehicle. "Stay here, children." I said. "I shall go and try the door.  Be brave for me, my loves. If I should not return, remember I will always love you."

My feet were leaden as I trod up the long, long drive.  My hand reached out toward the doorknob.  My fingers trembled but I forced them to turn the cold, hard handle.  And then, and then---.nothing!  Our trustworthy hound, Bucky, who always greeted us joyously whenever we returned from even the shortest jaunt, was not on the doorstep.  She had not come running at the sound of my presence. This was the final straw upon the laden camel's back.  I could bear it no longer but turned and fled back down the drive.

"Let us go and take refuge at the neighbors, my sons." I said. "I believe we should summon the local constables." Our neighbors gladly took us in, made us welcome and comforted us while we made the necessary call. And so we waited.

They came, those protectors of the peace, those warriors for the woe begotten.  I  ran out to greet them. "Ma'am, what's the trouble, ma'am?" asked one.

"Oh, Officer, please help us," I said, holding my lace handkerchief to my moist eyelids.  "My husband has gone away on a business trip and we are all alone."

"Stay back," he exclaimed, bravely. "We shall search the house for intruders and report back to you."

We stood in the lonely cul de sac watching the stalwart defenders of the city move through the quiet house. We could see the glow of their flashlights as they moved from room to room to room.  At the top of the stairs the light froze, then finally moved on again. Then the fearless officers emerged slowly from the now lit garage, trailed by a sleepy looking dog

"Well, ma'am, sometimes when a jet flies over, the radio frequencies will cause a garage door opener to malfunction. We went through the whole house and we are pretty sure no one has been in there. We're especially sure there was no one in the upstairs bedroom before we got there because when Officer Baker, here, opened the door a whole box of confetti fell down on his head from the top of the door. You almost got a hole blown in your wall.

"Oh, yeah," said Jake.  "I was setting a trap for my brother so that when he opened the door to my room he'd get hit on the head with the confetti. I wanted to use water but I couldn't find a bucket.  I guess the confetti worked, huh?"

And so our little family went safely back to our home, to sleep, perchance to dream.  And Jake was confined to his room the next day, his only companion the stalwart vacuum cleaner.