My military husband had deployed for six months. I was left home with a toddler and two BIG dogs (combined weight 175 pounds! They weren’t supposed to be that big, but that’s another story for another day.) My dad, a 60-something apple-shaped man who never met a piece of pie he didn’t devour, traveled 400 miles to help me out for a few weeks. His “help” consisted of letting me cook for him and clean up after him while he sat and watched Golden Girls reruns. But, to his credit, having another adult to talk to during the day saved my sanity. One afternoon the toddler was being a toddler (cutting teeth, if memory serves), so given the choice of staying home with the cranky child or taking the dogs for a walk to burn off some canine energy, Dad chose the dogs. Off he went, leashed up to the usually well-behaved beasts for an anticipated 15-minute trot around the block.
He was gone a really long time. I got really worried. My fears ran the gamut from Dad suffering a heart attack to the dogs getting loose and running into traffic.
At the 52-minute mark, I strapped toddler onto the seat on the back of my bicycle and we went looking.
We found dad and the dogs about two blocks from home. He’d taken a wrong turn and gotten lost on the winding streets of our planned development. HUGE sigh of relief. We rode alongside to make sure he found his way home, all the while chatting about what I would cook for dinner that night.
“Uh-oh,” I said when I saw a calico cat perched on a neighbor’s sunny front porch.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“A cat.” My dogs didn’t like cats. And they especially didn’t like that particular calico who took great pleasure in taunting them as she cleaned herself while perched atop the fence post in our backyard.
“What does that mean?” Dad asked.
The cat streaked across our path. “Hold on tight!”
Next thing I knew, my dad was on his bulbous belly, being dragged across a neighbor’s front yard. His arms were stretched over his head as he rocked back and forth, the leashes tight around his wrists as the dogs pulled him the length of the lawn. The cat jumped over the fence and disappeared. My dogs sniffed the ground where the cat had last set paw. My dad lay, stunned, with little bits of grass stuck to his face.
Yes, it was horrific, but I sheepishly admit I have never laughed so hard in my life. Tears streamed down my eyes and I couldn’t get a single word out. I still laugh at the memory.
We made it home without further incident. Dad’s pride was bruised, but his 200 body parts remained intact. The grass stains on his shirt and knees came out in the wash. My don would put his arms over his head and rock his body, imitating dad’s adventure, and we would all break out into peals of laughter again.
We laughed about his suburban version of his Nantucket sleighride the rest of his life.
Employing the old writer’s adage, “write what you know,” I used this experience to craft the opening scene in my first romance novel, Bailey’s Most Wanted. Don’t go rushing off to buy a copy, because that one never saw the light of day. While the first scene was great, it went downhill…fast…from there. Turns out romance is not my genre. While I enjoy reading it, I just can’t keep two desperately in love people apart for 300 pages. Stories need conflict! Hence, I found my niche in mysteries, wherein when the story gets boring, I kill off a character. But I do so with a soupçon of hilarity, because life—and stories—are better when filled with humor.
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