Home security system hard to beat

I unlocked the door, and the second I opened it the blast began. It sounded like ten banshees fighting off a dozen gorillas. Holding my ears, I ran to the contraption on the wall by the front door and pushed the numbers (which, thankfully, I remembered) and was immediately greeted by a wonderful silence.

This had happened before, so I knew the house phone would ring in about a minute. Sure enough it did. They wanted to know the password. I couldn’t think of it. “It’s some kind of a fish,” I said. The lady said that wasn’t the answer she needed, so I said I’d try to find it and call her back. She gave me an 800 number to call. I had no paper or pen, so I tried really hard to remember it. I can’t imagine how I thought I could do that when I couldn’t even remember a simple password.

I tried to call my daughter and ask her, but her cell phone was in a black hole or something. I got her greeting.

So I got a drink of water, thinking that might help. Amazingly, it did. The password came to me at last. The alarm company lady called me back, and I proudly gave her the “word.” She said she already had called the police, and asked if I wanted her to cancel that order. I said yes.

Then my daughter called. The alarm lady had called her. Those people are mighty efficient. I explained the situation and apologized.

Finally, I remembered the reason I’d opened the door in the beginning. The hound dog needed medicine and didn’t want it, so I’d planned to get something out of the refrigerator to wrap around the pill.

Since the situation seemed under control at last, I got some cheese, hid the pill in it, and offered it to the dog. She still didn’t want it.

Time to poke it down her. After all, it wasn’t a large pill, about the size of an aspirin. I pried her mouth open, poked everything as far back inside as I could, and then held her mouth shut a moment. When I turned loose, she spit it out.

Now it had become two pills, because she had bit it in half. On the third try I finally got that thing on the back of her tongue, except for the other half I couldn’t find because it had landed in the flower bed.

I finished the other chores, all the while thinking about the “old days,” when nobody even had locks on their doors. Bob Dylan was right, “The Times They Are A-Changing.” That was in the 1960s, and it’s more so today.

My next problem was resetting the alarm. I closed and locked all the doors, then pushed in the numbers (thank heavens I still remembered them) and rushed out.

The thought occurred to me I might ought to check and make sure I did it correctly, but I chickened out. I sure didn’t want to hear the banshees again.