Month: January 2018

A smoke detector is a marvelous invention that everyone knows saves lives.  It is a compact, incredibly effective piece of technology that should be in every household.  Most importantly, lest I forget to mention it, the smoke detector is also evil incarnate.

Somehow, manufacturers of the smoke detector have discovered a way to ensure that the batteries in their products never die during the daytime.  A battery will cling to the last of its charge in these tiny, plastic, life-support systems while there is a sun in the sky, and only in the absolute darkness of night will they at last decide to release their hold on this earth.

And they do not die quietly, unnoticed.  Oh, no.  As anybody who has ever owned a smoke detector will attest, when the battery dies, a smoke detector will begin emitting a noise that sounds like the cry of a baby bird oddly distorted by the howling moan of a damned soul in hell.

Last night, at two o’clock in the morning, I was awakened from a deep restful slumber.  My eyes opened, and I realized that my heart was racing, but I had no idea what had startled me awake.  I listened intently in the current silence, waiting for the footfall of a burglar in my room, or a cry for help from the street outside.  But as I lay there in my bed, time passed, and I heard absolutely nothing.  Finally, convinced that I had perhaps been forced awake by a bad dream, I closed my eyes and prepared to fall back asleep.

Chirp!

My eyes snapped open once again, and I knew – I knew – what that noise was and what horrible events it portended.  At first, I tried to ignore it, thinking I could sleep through its intermittent screams and deal with it in the morning, but thirty seconds later … Chirp!  The noise pierced my ears like a sonic icepick.

The alerts are spaced a half minute apart.  Manufacturers have determined this to be the optimal pacing based on years of research conducted by Chinese water torturers.  The time is long enough to let you convince yourself that maybe the bleat you just heard was actually the last one.  Silence stretches, building your hopes that the problem has miraculously fixed itself.  You begin to relax, relief begins to set in, then … Chirp!  Madness is the only guaranteed outcome.

I crawled out of bed, realizing that the only hope of rescuing a few more hours of sleep was to silence the intermittent distress call.  Unfortunately, another side effect of the thirty second delay between alarms is the difficulty it creates in identifying exactly which smoke detector is the true culprit.  I stood in the hallway, lost and waiting for the noise that would guide me to my destination.  At last it called out to me.  I moved forward toward where I thought I had heard it.  When I stood in the kitchen, I paused again.  Thirty seconds crawled by.

Chirp!

Shit.  It was behind me now.  I had gone right past it.  I returned to the middle of the hallway and waited again.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Nothing.

Chirp!

I was close this time.  I realized it was in one of two bedrooms.  I poked my head into my daughter’s room and listened.  As I felt myself growing noticeably older, I finally received audible confirmation that I had found the bastard responsible for waking me up.  I went to the garage, retrieved the ladder and a nine-volt battery (because everyone knows that when you are barefoot and half-asleep, the safest place to be is on top of a ladder).

I climbed the ladder without any major incidents, removed the dying battery from the smoke detector and pulled the new battery from my shirt pocket.  Looking back at the detector, I realized that there were no marked positive and negative contacts in the battery compartment and I had completely failed to note the orientation of the original battery in the space.  Swearing, I stuffed the new battery inside, figuring I had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right.  I climbed off the ladder and waited in the silence.

Nothing.

Celebrating that I had gotten the battery in correctly the first time, I folded up the ladder and carried it down the hallway to replace it in the garage.

Chirp!

This, in a nutshell, is why I don’t like to gamble.  With my luck, let’s just say I hope my life is never dependent on a coin toss.  I took the ladder back into the bedroom and managed to get the battery situated correctly.  The whole procedure from first awakening to crawling back into bed took only fifteen minutes, but at 2 AM it felt like a lifetime had passed.  A miserable, sleep-deprived lifetime.  As I drifted off to sleep again, my wife suggested that when one battery dies, the rest are not far behind, so I should probably replace all the smoke detector batteries.

I don’t remember exactly what I said next, but I do remember waking up the next morning on the couch.

This week, I said goodbye to a dear, and beloved member of my family.  My tent-trailer.  It has been a faithful companion for the past ten years and is more important to me than my own children.  For those of you who may be thinking this is an exaggeration, let me assure you, it is not.

My tent-trailer would sit tirelessly and uncomplaining outside in the driveway for months, patiently waiting for me to take it out on our next outing.  The kids can’t go five minutes without demanding food, clothes, or some kind of attention.  The trailer provided me with safe shelter from rain and snow on many camping trips.  The kids can’t be bothered to get me a soda out of the refrigerator.  The trailer is a cheap alternative to hotels when travelling.  The kids suck money out of my pockets like a Vegas slot machine.

Advantage: tent-trailer.

So why did I get rid of it?  Optimism.  I made the blunder of thinking positively.  And I should know better than that by now, because optimism has consistently kicked me in the teeth over the years.  It always comes at a price.  And for me, this time, that price was $26,000.

Let me explain.

On the last day of 2017, I received an e-mail advising me that a short story I had written was going to be published.  The magazine to which I had submitted the story stated they loved the piece and wanted to buy it.  I chose to view this as a sign that 2018 is going to be a terrific year for me.  I furthered my string of bad decisions by mentioning my new positive outlook to my wife, and she informed me that, because 2018 was going to be so fantastic, we should replace our old trailer with a brand new one.  I am not totally sure how she made the connection between selling a story and buying a trailer, I still have not completely figured out how her head works, but nonetheless we ended up buying a new trailer.

I took my old trailer to the dealership and received $1,500 against the cost of the new one in trade.  When I asked what I could get if I signed over the children as well, the salesman threatened to call the police.

Advantage: tent-trailer.  Again.

I am going to miss the old trailer.  I still remember our very first camping trip after buying it, or as my wife and I fondly refer to it: the weekend that almost killed our marriage.

When we arrived at the campgrounds, the sun had already set.  It was dark and so cloudy there wasn’t even any moonlight to help us see.  My wife hopped out of the truck, ran behind the trailer, and began to direct me as I attempted to back the trailer into our reserved spot.  I promptly backed into a tree.

I believe my wife did it on purpose.  She insists that I simply do not know how to follow directions, but since I am writing this blog and she is not here to defend herself, I am going to go ahead and say it was on purpose.  Following the collision, there was a brief discussion about visual impairment, challenged intellects, and head placement in relation to other locations on the body.  There was also a lively round of suggestions as to other locations we could go and colorful methods of arriving there.

While my wife and I had our “chat,” the children ran off to hide in the woods shouting some nonsense about the advantages of finding a family of wolves to adopt them.

When I had run out of fresh new ways to describe my wife’s skill at giving directions, I told her I no longer wished for her assistance, and climbed back into the truck.  She told me that was a fortunate coincidence as she no longer wished to assist.  After five more unhindered attempts at parking, I finally got the trailer situated in its designated slot with only minimal additional damage to local flora.

I unhitched the tent-trailer from the truck, and I began to set it up, an activity that generally takes about half an hour.  Five minutes into the process, it began to rain.  The kids finally made their way back to our campsite, but only so they could crawl into the truck to stay dry as dad drowned in the downpour.  While the rest of the family sat in the truck with the heater running, I toiled blindly in the water and mud, working with a tiny flashlight clamped between my teeth, trying to remember if I was supposed to crank clockwise to lift the roof or counter-clockwise.  By the time I had finished setting up the trailer, I was soaked, shivering, tired, and ready to kill the next person that said, “If you need any help, just let me know.”

I banged on the truck window to let my loving family know that I was finished and to ask if they could stop singing along to the radio long enough to help me move our luggage.  They grudgingly assented.  Finally, we all crowded into the trailer to hide from the weather and to have dinner.  I warmed some hot dogs for us to eat.  I say “warmed” because “cooked” is too strong of a word for what that tiny propane stove did to food.  It was like trying to prepare a meal over a candle flame.  I suppose it was fortunate we had opted for hotdogs rather than hamburgers for the trip.  A nice case of E. coli just might have been the final nail in the coffin where our marriage currently rested.

Ah, good times.

The amazing part of this story isn’t that we survived to go home two days later.  The amazing part is that we actually packed up the trailer a little while later and went camping again.  And then again.  Over and over, year after year.  We survived snow, wind, rain, and even a few bears in our little trailer, and still we didn’t have enough common sense to just stay home.

Now, we have a bigger, fancier trailer.  Does this mean better camping?  Or just bigger disasters?  I suppose only time will tell.

I think my wife already has an attorney on retainer just in case it doesn’t go well.

After pounding on the window and screaming at her little sister accomplished nothing, my oldest daughter finally gave up.  She did not move to the other side of the car however, she just grew very quiet.  She leaned over and peered through the window at her sister, like a cat watching a goldfish in a bowl.  The goldfish in this analogy never bothered to look up or admit she had even noticed a cat in the vicinity.

What were my wife and I doing at the time?  Well, let’s just acknowledge that we suck as parents and move on, shall we?  Let’s focus on the fact that the kids were engaged in an epic standoff, and I just wanted to see what would happen next.

Except that nothing happened.  Absolutely nothing.  After about five minutes passed and neither girl had spoken or moved, my short attention span got the better of me.  I became bored, then a little irritated.  I realized it was time for me to take action.  I put the car in reverse, backed out of the driveway and drove off.

I’m not kidding.  I drove away with one kid still standing in the garage.  Why?  Well, as I noted above, I was merely continuing the parental suckage, maybe even kicking it up a level.  Besides that, I figured if they couldn’t settle their differences, maybe they needed some time apart.  I might have driven all the way to LA, if my wife hadn’t placed a hand on my arm and convinced me to go back.  She is often the only voice of reason in our family.  She told me, “You can’t do this to her.  She is going to be the one that picks which nursing home we end up in.”

I stopped the car, put it in reverse and returned to the driveway.

“Don’t run her over,” my wife told me, quietly.  I would say it was an unnecessary warning except that I actually did consider it for a moment.  A very short moment, but still….

I figured my daughter would be relieved enough that I came back that she would happily climb into the car without further confrontation, but I gravely underestimated the hate that two siblings can generate for one another.  She returned to her previous post, slammed her hand once more on the window, and ordered her sister to move over.  With her left hand, the younger one patted the empty seat next to her, then closed her eyes to focus more fully on her music.  The cat and fish game resumed.

I yelled.  I know I yelled because I did that loud, shouty thing I do that generally makes people start telling me to stop yelling.  In fact, I was louder and shoutier than usual, but the motionless golem standing outside the car did not react.  She was completely unable, or unwilling, to pull her attention away from her younger sister (who, by the way, was now bobbing her head to whatever she was listening to and pretending that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary was happening).

Being ignored while I’m yelling does not usually help to improve my mood.  I’m funny that way.  And this particular time was no exception.  I opened my door and lurched out of the car.  When my daughter finally looked up and met my gaze, I reminded her that I used to be a police officer.  I told her that being a police officer means that I own guns.  It also means, I know how to make a homicide look like an accident.

She finally got in the car.  Before she did, she rolled her eyes and muttered something about me always overreacting to things.  Yes, the kid that had just spend the past fifteen minutes banging on a window and screaming at her sister rather than walk around the car to get in told me I was overreacting.  I’m not saying she was wrong, but she said it with absolutely no irony in her voice.  She was serious.

Shaking my head in numb disbelief, I climbed back in, buckled my seatbelt, and took a deep breath.  I was still upset, and needing to have the last word, I told the girls, “I swear to God, if you two start fighting again, I’m going to stop this car and our vacation is over.”

I don’t know who said it.  I wasn’t looking in the rearview mirror at the time, so I can’t say for certain.  I just know that I heard a voice coming from the back seat that said, “What vacation?  We’re still in the driveway.”

I blacked out.

The next thing I remember is my right foot tangled up in my seatbelt and my head in the rear floorboards.  Both girls were out of the car, screaming and running for the neighbor’s house, and my wife was on her cell phone, talking to the hotel and explaining that we would be arriving much later than originally planned.

Recently, we took a road trip from Sacramento, California, down to Los Angeles.  By “we,” I mean me, my wife, and our two daughters.  By “road trip,” I mean a scenic tour of each of Dante’s nine circles of Hell.  The plan was to drive for six hours, saving ourselves the cost of four plane tickets, then spend an amazing week of family fun in the happiest place on Earth.  That was the plan.  The reality, unfortunately was something quite a bit different.

Our vacation began to derail right about the time I placed our suitcases into the car.  As I closed the trunk, my youngest daughter stepped up to the rear passenger side door and opened it.  My oldest immediately pushed it shut.

“What are you doing?” she asked her younger sister.  “This is my side of the car.  I always sit on this side.”

“You’ve been gone,” the younger one responded, referring to the fact that her sister had been away at college for the past few months.  “I sit on this side now.”

My youngest pulled the car door open again.  Her sister slammed it.

I stood in the garage for the next fifteen minutes, listening to a chorus of, “Go to the other side.”  “No, you go to the other side.”  “No, you go.”  Each sentence was punctuated by the banging of the car door as it was repeatedly pulled open and pushed shut.  Before the hinge broke and the poor abused door fell off onto the garage floor, I finally had to intervene.

I told the girls that one them could have the passenger side on the way to Los Angeles, then they would switch on our way home.  It was a simple elegant solution, and I was actually a little proud of myself for thinking of it.  The girls agreed to the proposal.

My youngest opened the car door and said, “I’ll be on this side first.”  The oldest pushed it shut.  “No, I will.”

I went into the house to find some aspirin and to tell my wife that she needed to go to the garage and get her children under control.

When I returned, the argument had apparently been settled.  The oldest had gotten her choice of seats for the first part of our trip, and the youngest was listening to music on headphones, ignoring the rest of us and pretending she didn’t really care about where she was sitting.  I started the car and backed out of the garage.

I don’t think I moved more than six feet before the car door popped open and the older kid jumped out and ran for the house, shouting, “I forgot something.”  As soon as she was out of the car, her sister unbuckled her seatbelt and casually, but very deliberately, slid over to the other side of the car and pulled the door shut.  I watched it happen.  I should have done something to stop it, but I just sat and stared as she glided across the seat with the slow inevitability of a glacier swallowing a continent.

I’m human.  And, like most humans, there is a tiny part of my brain that, when it senses a train wreck about to happen, it doesn’t want to help; it just wants to sit back and watch shit explode.

In my defense, my wife did not say anything, either.  I don’t know if she didn’t notice what the little monster was doing, or if she was having her own moment of inner struggle, but the final outcome was the same.  The music from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly played in my head, and I waited for Wyatt Earp to arrive at the OK Corral.  Okay, I know I’m mixing up my movies, but the point is I was now just an uninvolved spectator waiting for the shootout to occur.

The older girl returned with – of course – nothing in her hands.  I still do not know what it is that she “forgot.”  As she stepped up to the car, I heard a chunk as the door locks engaged.  I discovered in that moment, that my younger kid is even more evil than I had previously realized.  She didn’t even look up as her sister pounded on the window.

She just twirled her finger in the air and said, “go to the other side.”

(How does this standoff end?  Check in next week for part 2.)