Last week I was awakened at 5:00 a.m. by a shrill, piercing,
nonstop whistle. Imagine a smoke alarm,
except it isn’t beeping; it’s just continuing.
St. Bob could
sleep even if a marching band came tromping right into the bedroom.
However, he cannot sleep if his
wife keeps nudging him and shouting his name.
“What’s that noise?” I ask. “Do you think the house is on fire?” It
doesn’t smell smoky, but neither do deadly gas fumes, which I am also
imagining.
I might add
that this is the worst time to be awakened because it’s just close enough to
your real wake-up time that you can’t get back to sleep again. But Bob is a
saint, remember, so he gets up and goes downstairs to investigate.
He is gone
for a very long time. Now I am imagining
robbers gagging him and tying him to a chair.
Finally I get up as well.
Bob has
dragged the ladder in from the garage and has dismantled two of the smoke
alarms by the time I arrive. But then he
gets an idea. He checks the family room where we have beeper pads on our sofas,
to keep Mickey (often the culprit in these stories) from jumping onto the
cushions.
Turns out we
forgot to put Mickey in her crate for the night, which she actually loves, and
she had jumped up onto the sofa, set off the beeper pad, and then jumped down.
Except that
she also knocked a blanket off the sofa, and that was now resting heavily atop
the pad, making it beep incessantly until Bob pulled off the blanket and saved
all our hearing. Mickey, by the way, was
hiding in the back yard, and only timidly approached once the siren had
stopped.
We glanced
back at the ladder and the two dismantled smoke alarms. We glanced at the
beeper pad. We glanced at Mickey. We glanced at the clock. Oh, well.
Anyone for sausage and pancakes?
Next
time you’re up in the middle of the night,
grab a good book to read. Might I
suggest one of mine? You can find them
all right here, along with my YouTube Mom videos.
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