Sunday morning, 4am : BOOM! Lightning and thunder crash.
4:12: BoomBoomBoomBoom!
Lauren (thinking): That is weird thunder.
4:13: BoomBoomBoomBoom!
Lauren (thinking): Is that knocking? That can’t be knocking. (Turns fan off)
BoomBoomBoomBoom!
Lloyd: Is that knocking?
Yes!!! At this point there is a fair amount of panic going on. You never know in the seconds of emergency what is going on or what you’ll do.
I should preface this story with the fact that Thursday morning there was some strange dude standing on our sidewalk talking on his phone when Lloyd left for work. Lloyd circled the block to see if he was still there and called me on his way into Lincoln to let me know about him. (The stranger texted on his phone for a while, but was gone before I left the house.)
So my first thought is, “It’s that guy!” I grabbed the large nail that is my pathetic bedside weapon of choice, but realized in the hallway that it was a pencil. Apparently I was going to draw this intruder a nice cartoon.
Lloyd was a few steps ahead of me in the hallway. In the darkness he abruptly turned to me and whispered, “I don’t have a tie.” I didn’t know what he was talking about, since this definitely wasn’t a formal occasion, but he meant that the robe he grabbed was missing the tie. We ran back for another robe, headed down the hall, when he stopped and hissed, “THIS doesn’t have a tie, either.” Well, I’m sorry, mister, but sometimes when you’re taking a nap in the guest room you have to secure a fan to a stool so it will blow just right, and maybe that means you’ll be meet a robber in your underwear, ok?
Ok, third robe was a charm. We ran down the stairs, I exchanged my writing utensil for a knife and headed to the door. On the way, I saw a police car out front.
There was an officer at our front door. He said, “I’m sorry to bother you folks, but we received a 911 call from this address.” I was soooo confused, because when I heard the knocking, one of my thoughts was to call the cops. Had I done that??
“We don’t even have a landline,” I said, but Lloyd said that our internet came through a phone line, and could that be it? The police officer – standing in the rain – said that yes, sometimes a misdial happens when there is a storm. He apologized, left and we went back to bed.
But not to sleep. I sat there and thought, in my adrenaline-crazed state, “What if this was a scam? What if he’s a murderer and is going around saying this to all kinds of people??” Well, I went online, and it turns out that it is not uncommon for phone lines to wig out during storms and send incorrect pulses down the line.
But I was up. So I stayed up.
While I am glad that everything turned out alright, it also makes me glad that I don’t have a gun. I know that there are many people out there who are pro-protection, but let me just present an alternate scenario:
I usually sleep with a pillow over my head. This was one night where I didn’t. If I had, I wouldn’t have heard the pounding. If I hadn’t heard the pounding, the policeman would have come inside to see what the reason for the 911 call was. We would have had an ‘intruder’, and might have made a fatal error.
Much better to have a nail. Wait – a pencil.