Spring is a time of promise, of opening our windows to blow out the germy winter air and replace it with nature’s sweet ionic breath. It’s also the time of year when I remember how a female police officer, her hair in one thick braid, walking through my bushes like a tense ghost, hand over her gun, glaring at me, and asking, “Is everything okay, sir?”   

I’m normally a good parent, good by my own standards anyway, which and is to say by guy standards. Sandy, my wife, was gone for the weekend, so it was just me and our three kids, plus Kayla, their cousin.

It was a sunny, warm, and breezy weekend. All was right with my little suburbia world. I was reading, lounging, and listening to A Prairie Home Companion. Four kids were running around the house, and so as a guy, as long as they don’t come to me carrying one of their own limbs, I don’t really pay much attention.

And as a guy, I try not to contaminate play, you know, hover, ask a lot of questions, make sure everyone’s self-esteem is pumping on all cylinders, that everyone in the play group feels empowered, that everything’s equal and everyone agrees—you know, the kind of stuff mom’s are prone to do.

I’m a guy, so if children must run with scissors, I make sure the pointed end is pointed down and I make sure to tell them to roll onto their back if they fall, keeping their scissor hand away from their body. If they choose to jump from the trampoline into the pool, “tuck,” I say. “You’ll rotate faster.” These are things my wife will never say to our children. Her tombstone could read, “Careful. That Could Hurt You.”

And I don’t respond to just any scream either. It has to have a panicky quality, the kind you hear in horror movies or when people are drowning, before I’m going to get up and investigate. Scratches have to be real, dramatic, something out of Alien—not white, but red, swollen, weeping with mucus and something swimming in them before I’ll put anything on them.

So when my son Garrett and his cousin Kayla told me in my office that “We dialed 9-9-1,” I brushed it off as a clever joke. Sure you did, you rambunctious children, I thought. 9-9-1. You pranksters. I wasn’t born yesterday.

Well, apparently I was.

They told me again. I didn’t believe them. Then again. I told them to go away like the flies they were because Garrison Keillor was about to give us the news from Lake Wobegon, a near sacred time in my week. The prank was getting old, so I went to the front yard to get a break.

I was reading The Humor of Kierkegaard, not exactly a best seller I know. He puts you in an existentialist state of mind, so a philosophical attitude toward life was billowing inside me, like cumulous clouds. I was hearing one hand clapping in the forest, I was thinking about smoking a pipe (but what style? I wondered: corncob, or that thing that looks like a mini saxophone?) when out of the bushes came a woman dressed in blue.