Fraught with Peril: The Road to Connecticut

 So Sydney and I set off to visit Savannah in Connecticut over the long Memorial Day week-end. We jumped into the Titan and left the house at a respectable 3 pm. "You don't mind stopping to get me a KFC potato bowl, do you?" asked my daughter, lounging comfortably in the passenger seat, "You can just scoot through the drive-thru." When I mentioned getting a Dunkin' Donut, she waved her hand dismissively, "Oh, there's a ton on the freeway." Except there WASN'T. When we would stop later for gas, at 9 o'clock, Sydney would then accuse me of waiting deliberately until Starbucks was closed. WHAT?!?! Me?!?! Deliberately cause her to miss a snacking opportunity?!?

She also expressed her displeasure regarding my parking strategy. "Why are we parked so far away," she complained as I worked to regain feeling in my numb bum. "This isn't safe at all," she said, "Look at that murder van." "It has a large infant painted on it," I observed. "Identifying its target," Sydney nodded. As we returned to the van, Sydney complained about my long strides. "If you're looking to stretch," she said, "you should raise your knees." I followed her suggestion until she begged me to stop. "You look like a Tennessee Walking Horse."

We headed over to fuel up and ended up parked behind the murder van. Obviously inspired, the driver was stretching...arms up to the sky...waist twists...and then he launched himself into a cartwheel. Clearly, this was a murderer-in-the-making. A high-stepping gal such as myself would normally NOT label others but...when the murderer-in-the-making suddenly sprinted off into the darkness, leaving the fuel pump inserted into his baby murder van, I went into Code Plaid. "Get in the truck," I yelled to Sydney and we immediately launched into hyper-drive, waiting for the explosive blast to illuminate our interior. You can never be too careful about a man who cartwheels. They are on EVERY watch-list out there.

Sydney's ONLY job was to alert me to GPS changes. Unfortunately, she was very busy texting the riot act to a young man who foolishly addressed her with the following message:  "How's my big girl Sydney who is thick in all the right places?" Oh dear. And he'd been doing so well...plying her with clementine oranges over the last few weeks, worming his way into her heart with citrus. So she was explaining how he was also thick...in the head... while we careened past our exit and landed in a place called Coxsackie. Translated from the Native American, it means "owl's hoot" but we had just survived a terrorist attack and were tired,hungry and immature so we spent way too much time phonetically pronouncing the name and laughing hysterically. It was only the karmatic timing of Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer" that jolted us out of our spurt of juvenile humor. "Oh...we're half-way there..." we howled. "I feel like we're going too fast," I told Sydney as she slid toward me as we rode with two wheels on the round-about to get us back on the freeway. "That posted sign says 45 mph," Sydney said, the g-forces pulling the words from her lips, "How fast are we going?" Oh.

We pulled into Savannah's parking lot to discover that half of her apartment complex had burned to the ground. "Well...when was someone going to get around to telling me this," I grumbled, stomping up the stairs. "There was no sense worrying you," Sydney explained, "It wasn't SAVANNAH'S apartment." "It COULD have been," I answered. "See...that's why we didn't tell you," she said, wrestling the door open. I couldn't have been more delighted...more heartened...by the sight that met my eyes. There on Savannah's coffee table was a box of Oliver's chocolate coconut clusters. I'd been through so much...oh, never mind. You know how this ends. I didn't have a prayer of getting a coconut cluster.