Sometimes when my parents talk to me, I can feel my brain turning over in its grave. Their stories can take on a surreal, surely-someone-slipped-me-some-LSD aspect.
For example: Just past midnight a few nights ago, my mother awoke to the sound of a horse throwing up in the backyard.
My mother has never heard a horse throw up before, so it is pretty impressive that she was able to identify the species of the animal solely by the noise it was making. When she looked out into the night, she couldn’t see anything, but “I knew,” she says, “that I had to help that horse.”
My mother was sleeping downstairs because of a foot injury and because my father was sleeping upstairs. My mom went to the bottom of the staircase and yelled: “Bill! There’s a horse in the backyard who needs you to go out there and help him!”
Presumably my father’s slumbering brain processed this information and decided that the situation wasn’t urgent enough to warrant waking up the boss. My mother tried to call my dad’s cellphone to summon him, but it was in the kitchen.
(Cellphone records subsequently showed that a call was completed at just before 1 a.m., which means my mother dialed the phone and then went into the kitchen and answered it.)
Faced with a gastro-equine emergency and a sleeping husband, my mom called 911 and explained that she needed the dispatcher to call the house phone and tell my dad to get out of bed.
“I couldn’t call my own number, but if they phoned, I would just let it ring until Bill answered it,” she explains reasonably. “He would have to answer if the police called.”
I’m as unsure as to how my father would know it was the police on the line by the sound of the phone ringing as I am how my mother knew it was a horse by the sound of its gagging. Regardless, the dispatcher explained that the 911 system wasn’t designed for wakeup calls.
“Then never mind,” my mother said. She’s not normally a rude person, but there was a sick horse that she couldn’t see out in the yard and she needed to rouse my father because he would know what to do about it because he was a gynecologist.
She hung up on the dispatcher and went to peer out the window at the horse, only to find that things had gotten worse: Now the poor animal was not only invisible; it was completely quiet, suffering in silence.
“Bill!” she yelled.
The phone rang. It was the dispatcher.
“I thought you weren’t going to call!” she complained. “If I had known it was you, I wouldn’t have answered.”
“Hello?” my father bellowed gruffly.
“Bill! Wake up!”
“I am awake,” he snapped.
The dispatcher interrupted this romantic interchange to identify himself. My father was startled to learn that he had the emergency operator on the line and asked what was going on.
“You wouldn’t wake up!” my mother said.
“The police are calling because I wouldn’t wake up?” my father responded.
“The call originated from your line, sir,” the dispatcher said.
“You called 911 because I wasn’t awake? It’s 1 in the morning!” my dad said.
“There’s a horse in the backyard,” my mother proclaimed triumphantly. “It’s sick.”
“A horse? I don’t see a horse,” my dad responded.
“Well you can’t see it,” my mother said.
“I can’t hear any horse, either.”
“You can’t hear it. But it woke me up,” my mom said.
“A horse you can’t see or hear woke you up?” my dad demanded.
“We have a car en route,” the dispatcher advised them.
“Why?” my father demanded, offended.
“He’s very antisocial,” my mother confided to the dispatcher.
“It’s 1 in the morning!” my father shouted.
At this point, two police officers knocked at the front door. A flashlight search of the backyard revealed no horses, sick or otherwise. “Next time my wife calls, don’t answer,” my dad advised. The officers weren’t sure they could do that.
My mother says the whole incident could have been avoided. “It’s your father’s fault,” she claims. “He should have gotten out of bed.”
Contact W. Bruce Cameron at . For his previous columns visit .
