Visitors

It happened again. In the category of it could only happen to me/us, it happened again. As you might guess, living where we live, we don’t get many visitors dropping by our house. If you exclude the purple or brown attired delivery truck drivers, we don’t get more than a handful of visitors every year.

If you exclude the census takers from both 2010 and 2020 the handful is smaller. If you consider census takers visitors, you really don’t get many visitors. I have a recollection of the white-shirted, bicycle-riding religious guys stopping by years ago, but only once. I’m not sure that they actually stopped by or I just dreamed it.

It’s been at least fifteen years since any one of my brothers has stopped by. Elaine’s family have taken vacations and stopped by to visit.

Repairmen won’t come to our house. A few years ago, Elaine and I purchased new kitchen appliances from one of the new membership/warehouse stores. It wasn’t long and the ice machine in the refrigerator stopped working.

The membership store refunded the entire price of the refrigerator, rather than send someone to repair/replace the ice machine.

We’ve never had trick-or-treaters, not even the adult kind that stops by for a shot of “Crown”. OK, we have had neighbors stop by, but not often.

This past Wednesday night we had a visitor. Set aside the fact, it is strange weird enough to have a visitor, but everything about the visit was downright weird. First, It was well past sundown and snowing. No one in the family noticed our motion-activated exterior lights were lit.

Our family was watching television together, like, the same show. We were watching television as a family group. We have three televisions in our house and they are usually on different channels.

Before I talk about our visitor, did you know there is a show on television where contestants are dressed in giant five-hundred-pound masks and costumes? The contestants are asked to sing to four judges and a studio audience. The judges get emotional and cry, the audience screams, and some of them pass out. Judges and audience alike, yell out, “Take it off, take it off!”, which makes absolutely no sense because if they take off the costume/mask, there would be no purpose to the show. I haven’t heard screaming like that since the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan.

After the contestant finishes with his/her song, they take off the giant mask/costume revealing their identity to the judges and audience. Everyone screams and points at the contestant, Me? I scream, “Who the (construction language) is that? Can we change the channel?”

Sorry, I haven’t been able to focus since the doctors put me on these pain pills. I think I was writing about a visitor.

I’m not sure what happened next, whether it was we noticed the motion-activated lights were on, or we heard knocking at the door.

Ivy, followed by Elaine, ran to the door. It is dark and snowing. I saw no reason to run to the door, UNTIL, I heard this person say, “Can you take me to the police station? I don’t know if I’m going to hurt them.” I can’t speak for everyone, but when you hear something like that, it doesn’t matter what you are watching on television, get out of your chair.

With this visitor now standing inside the door, our family engaged in a short (very short) conversation about who was going to take the visitor to a police station. Some of the family was looking for coats. At least one us was unlocking the safe.

We must have momentarily lost our minds. When it is snowing and our (new) favorite show is on television, we are not going to town.

For a short time, Elaine and I thought about driving to the nearest police station. I came to my senses. I told this person I will call the sheriff and have them send someone.

I have mentioned in these stories, it can take more than an hour for law enforcement to reach our home, which is exactly the reason to have a safe. I can tell you stories.

The 911 dispatcher asked to speak with this person. The phone call has now taken so long that I borrowed from Ivy another “smart” phone to call 911 dispatch to find out if they were sending a deputy. I was told to be patient; the deputy is en route and should be there “shortly”.

Elaine took the visitor to the living room and sat with them on the couch. I guess I relaxed a little when I heard Elaine and this person discussing how many boxes of facial tissues we had in the house. (17 boxes) This was becoming important to the story because Elaine is handing this person several tissues every few seconds. Our visitor now has a pile of tear-soaked, snot-covered facial tissues separating them from Elaine on the couch

Finally, a deputy arrived at our house. It was another forty-five minutes before another deputy arrived. We welcomed the deputies into our house, which might have been a mistake. They used our home to interview our guest, with one deputy actually leaving and coming back a half-hour later.

I don’t know how the story ended; the deputies eventually took our visitor away. I took inventory of our remaining facial tissues (16 ½ boxes) We missed the end of the costume show, and I am probably a better man for it. I have no idea what person was allowed to remove their five-hundred-pound mask.

One more thing about the 2010 census taker. She left in a panic when our free-ranging yaks thought it would be great fun to chase her. We yelled to drive faster, but she couldn’t hear us over the pounding hooves and her own screaming. We’re not sure we made it into that years’ count.

I received a call (twice) from CDC this past week. They wanted to ask me questions about beervirus. They didn't need any more answers after they asked how I felt about vaccinating children. They got really mad when I told them it was none of my business because my children are not children.

Our crazy lives!

Monner