Many years ago, I was working midnights in a small ER in northern Michigan. One night, around 0300, the phone rang. I answered it to find my wife on the other end. Her opening conversational gambit certainly caught my attention.
“Honey, it’s me. Don’t panic.”
Sounded like good advice to me. “OK, I’m not panicking. What might make me consider panicking?”
“Well, when you hear on the scanner that the sheriff is sending a car out here, I thought you’d get worried.”
Hmmm, the hospital still has coffee. Why would the sheriff send a car out to my home, populated by my wife and (presumably) sleeping children? I asked, “Why is the sheriff on the way out there?”
She responded, as if telling me about the dog getting into the trash, “There is a guy on the porch.”
Remember the guy-on-the-porch story I told y’all recently? Yeah, I certainly did. I was beginning to very much NOT like the direction this conversation was taking, so I asked her, “What gun do you have?”
“I don’t.”
This required remedy. “I’ll wait while you fix that.”
My normally clear thinking bride seemed somewhat slow this morning. “Huh?”
“Go get a gun, right now. I’ll wait.”
“What? Why would I get a gun?”
“Because I think it would be a good thing if you had something more compelling than your girlish good looks and winning personality should Mr. Porch decide that now was the time to enter, and lay hands on you and the children. Go. Now.”
Evidently Mr. Porch had decided that he did not, really, need to enter THIS house on THIS night, because this porch guy had elected to wander off before the sheriff’s deputy arrived, and before The Darling Wife felt the need for a little show-and-tell. No loud noises, nobody got hurt, Score! Score, and SCORE!
Musings of A Stretcher Ape 
Around here, EVERY after-dark incident gets responded to with a gun in hand.
Good discussion with the Spousal Unit.
Kudos.
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