One day last week, I was riding along on my way to pick the kids up from school on Wednesday, when I saw someone open up their driver side door about a block ahead of me. It’s a pretty busy street so I gave a quick glance over my shoulder and moved my bike out into the road so I’d be out of door range. As I looked back, the door of a pickup parked right in front of me flung open – if it hadn’t been for the car up ahead, I would have become one with the pickup truck. Lucky break!
Riding with the kids later on, we heard the unmistakable chiming song of an ice cream truck idling on one of the streets we cross. Our kids are pretty careful on their bikes, but I swear they were like sailers to sirens and completely lost all sense of direction and purpose. I wasn’t very lyre-like, though, as I hollered them through the intersection – “Cross now! Don’t stop riding! People are waiting for you! Watch out for the stroller!” They didn’t lose the glaze in their eyes till we were about a block from home. It really is a wonder that they didn’t crash or get run over.
Then Thursday morning, Tom had an early meeting so the kids and I rode out to school after he left. I pulled out my bike and loaded it up with the bags. I went back into the garage to take the kids’ bikes out for them and I heard the door close behind me. We have a regular door on the side of our garage – the roll up door had been replaced with windows before we bought the house. Our garage door is like the cellar door at Mum and Dad’s house that just naturally swings shut, and I seem to have a thing about not propping it open. It probably stems from being a kid and daring myself to make it to the bottom of the cellar stairs before the door closed behind me – those kinds of tests can die hard. Now it’s morphed into an awkward garage dance where I try to get a bike wheel into the closing gap in the door each morning. Too lazy or stubborn to prop the dang thing open. Well yesterday, it closed, the nerve of it, and when I grabbed the doorknob, it popped right off. A second later, I heard the knob on the other side hit the cement.
There I was, staring at the closed door with no knob – kids in the house, phone in my bike in the driveway. I had visions of my neighbors discovering me waving pitifully at them with my face pressed against the garage windows. Fortunately I discovered that the doorknob spindle was inside with me, and after working on it for a few minutes, I was able to work the tab back and get the door open. When I relayed the story to Tom later, he laughed so hard he had to pause to catch his breath. I muttered something ungraceful about being happy to have provided his entertainment for the day, and he said, “The day? I’m going to be entertained by this for weeks!”
Or how about this? In the middle of the night on Wednesday, Honey got up, went to the bathroom and washed her hands, then came into our room to tell me something. No problem there – except for one thing. She was operating in stealth mode and I didn’t hear any of this. I was woken up from the black of a deep sleep by a small, cold, wet hand on my knee. Did I have an appropriate reaction to this psycho horror movie situation? Thankfully, no and oddly, yes. Thankfully no in that I didn’t wind anyone up in the emergency room. What I did do was shoot straight up in bed and shout, “Jeepers Creepers!!!” Oddly yes in that it turns out that there’s a series of horror movies called – you guessed it, Jeepers Creepers. But I was unaware of that until about 3 minutes ago, which begs the question – which decade am I from, anyway? Who says Jeepers Creepers anymore? When I told my friend Lori, she laughed,”That’s a real ‘whoopsie daisies’ moment!”
This run of situations (and I’m not even going into the one about very nearly walking into a meeting with a major piece of spinach in my teeth) did flash a scene in my mind of a guardian angel dispatch office, looking like the set from the old show Taxi, with the dispatcher barking, “Murphy! You’re gettin’ ‘er this week and I don’t wanna hear another *%# word outa ya!”