April 28, 2003
DOWN HOME:
Car alarms, dogs and night noises
___Lindsay's car sorta reminds me of Betsy when she was a puppy.
___Both times, Joanna specifically controlled where they got to spend the night.
___Lindsay is our 19-year-old daughter. She's a freshman at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, and we got her a new (well, new to her) car late last year.
___Betsy is our 11-year-old Yorkie-poo; three-fourths Yorkshire terrier, one-quarter poodle. She sleeps in a steel kennel about three feet from my head.
___Joanna is my wife. You don't need to know how old she is. She sleeps immediately to my left, and she likes to get a good night's sleep.
___When we brought Betsy home as a present for Lindsay's and her sister Molly's eighth and fifth birthdays, Jo decreed that Betsy would sleep in a kennel in our bedroom.
___Jo reasoned--and I certainly couldn't argue with her logic--that puppies had no business roaming the house at night. A puppy, and later a dog, could make noise and wake us up. This would not be good. In fact, this would be downright terrible, especially if the girls hoped to keep a dog in the house for very long.
___So, for more than a decade, Betsy's slept in that big blue kennel--lined with her favorite old terry bathrobe and an old flannel dress. She never roams, never barks. But now that she's 77 in "dog years," she snores and wakes me up almost every night. Jo just snoozes.
___Lindsay's car, however, is a different matter. It came equipped with a "keyless entry system" that also includes the kind of burglar alarm that people ignore in parking lots outside malls all over the planet.
___But Lindsay's burglar alarm is hyper-sensitive. When Lindsay came home from school and parked her car in the street, the alarm would go off if another car even drove past. Why a car needs to drive down our street at 2:37 a.m. I'll never know, but I guarantee you that burglar alarm never rests.
___So, Jo banished Lindsay's car to the driveway behind the house. Apparently, people don't drive up and down our driveway at 2:37 a.m. When the kid came home from college for Easter, we all slept all night. Except when Betsy woke me up with her snoring.
___While Lindsay was home, I contorted my body to get up under the dash and attempted to re-set the sensitivity switch on her car's burglar alarm. If scores of freshman women at HSU are waking up because Lindsay's horn honks at 2:37 in the morning, then I turned the switch the wrong way.
___The car also reminds me of hyper-sensitive Christians who go off squawking at the slightest bump. Sure, evil exists and some things are frightening. But God made a good world. If we blare our alarms at every provocation, the rest of the world will ignore us, just like a car alarm in a mall parking lot.
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