This story is sad--so sad in fact that it may not be appropriate for younger readers or one of my children, for reasons which will soon become clear. It's Monday afternoon. I'm at the church in my study, working my corner of God's vineyard, when my cell phone rings. Linda is on the line. She sounds agitated, upset, frustrated, but not as much as the dog I hear yelping in the background. Ranger, one of our grand-dogs, is boarding with us while his true family enjoys a long weekend in the mountains of Virginia. From his carrying on I wondered if the dog has been hit by a bus or bitten by a snake. Did Linda need me to take out a second mortgage on our home so we could carry Ranger to the emergency vet? Ranger was, in fact, healthy, but not at all happy. Linda explained. One of our smoke detectors decided that today was the day to practice chirping. Every thirty seconds or so, the smoke alarm emitted a brief high piercing chirp. This sound must have hurt Ranger's ears or perhaps his feelings, thinking that we weren't taking fire safety seriously, because he answered each chirp with his own high piercing yelp and a few bellowing barks. He's a big dog with a big bark. Neighbors hear him bark. Low flying aircraft hear him bark. Linda was calling to tell me that she couldn't stop the smoke detector because the one that decided to chirp was high atop the vaulted ceiling in our master bedroom. "What should I do?" she asked rather pitifully. Donning my family superhero cape, I told Linda I would pack up my work (which is about three feet deep this week), head to the house, and help her solve the fire alarm/canine cacophony crisis. I drove the ten miles home, wondering if I would find both Linda and Ranger still alive when I arrived. When I burst through the door, nothing had changed. The smoke alarm was still chirping. The dog, now outside our house on the back porch, was still booming a reply to each chirp. And Linda was very nearly at the end of her rope. I scurried up the stairs to our storage room, grabbed my faithful five-foot stepladder, descended the stairs to the source of the chirping, climbed to the top of my ladder, and realized that even a five-foot ladder and a six-foot man with long arms was not enough to scale the heights at which our chirping alarm was perched.
There I was, fully extended toward the ceiling with Linda steadying the ladder with one hand and holding on to my leg with the other when we suffered a hostile home invasion. Ranger, who had been placed in outside timeout for making too much racket indoors, came bursting into the room. Ranger is a very bright dog. In his desire to be with us while the chirp monster was attacking, he had figured out a way to hit the back door handle with his head and open it. In he ran to protect us in our time of need, and, parenthetically, to share the news with us that he had found a mud puddle in our backyard in which he had wallowed like a pig with poison ivy. Now the mud puddle was not so much in the yard as it was in the house. Ranger had tracked mud all over the deck, through the breakfast room and on to the carpet in our bedroom. Being a wet dog, Ranger had also given in his canine instincts to shake his wet muddy fur. Allow me to pause at this point in our story to share a bit of background about recent renovations we have made to our home and our firm commitment to preserve their beauty. Ranger did not just track mud, he tracked it across our newly refinished floors and recently replaced bedroom carpet. He did not just shake mud off his fur, he splattered it on a number of our freshly painted walls. Fighting my caninicidal impulses, I swept Ranger out of the house, tied his leash to our deck railing, and closed and dead bolted the door. He's smart, but I don't think he can pick locks.
Catching my breath and regaining my composure, Linda and I shifted into disaster relief mode. I wiped down walls and hardwood floors while she scooped and scrubbed mud from the carpet. Believing this brief though eventful interruption was over, I returned to my primary reason for leaving work and coming home--the still chirping smoke detector. I walked through the house, looking for something on which I might place my ladder to raise it and myself to new heights and a chance to reach the pesky smoke detector. I was weighing options when Linda said, "We need a taller ladder to reach several things around the house. Why don't you go and buy one quickly?"
Strange how all other possible solutions evaporate when a man is given the opportunity to go to the home improvement store and buy something. I drove to Lowes. I looked at every ladder in the store. I entertained the thought that two four-foot ladders are not functionally equivalent to one eight-foot ladder. I carried my eight-foot ladder to the checkout with my bare hands. No shopping cart for me. I was like a pioneer crossing the great prairie. As I toted my freshly purchased eight-foot ladder across the parking lot, a new challenge peeked above the horizon. I had driven my car to Lowes, not Linda's car. Her car is a mid-sized SUV with fold-down seats and generous cargo space. I drive a Toyota Corolla which doesn't have adequate room for two grandchildren in car-seats and a six-foot grand-chauffer. I sat my ladder down next to my car. Never had an eight-foot ladder looked so long and a Corolla so short. But not cherishing the thought of carrying the ladder home on foot, then jogging back to pick up my car, I tried to make the ladder fit like a child trying to squeeze his foot into shoes he's outgrown. Consulting my owner's manual, I learned that Corolla rear seats will fold down to extend the trunk. This I did creating a space that was not nearly long enough. I then pushed the front passenger seat as far forward as it would go and folded up the back of the seat until it touched the dashboard. My car was still about six inches short of an eight-foot load. Worried that Ranger may have picked the lock to the back door by this time or that Linda had finally stopped the chirping by setting the house on fire, necessity gave birth to invention. Using a bungee cord to keep the trunk lid from flying wide opened, I left Lowes with the bottom foot of my new ladder hanging out of the back of my car. I kept one hand on the top of the ladder to be sure it didn't become a projectile on its trip to its new home.
My new ladder was indeed tall enough for me to reach the rapscallion of a smoke detector, unplug it from its power cord, remove its battery and discharge its residual energy with one pathetic chirp that sounded like the ever deepening voice on a phonograph record coasting to a stop. I had defeated the chirp, but I now had a home without adequate fire protection, not to mention a muddy dog on the deck. I turned for help to my source of unlimited wisdom, the fount of all knowledge, the one who can make a brave repairman out of a mere husband--YouTube. I watched two videos, knowing that important decisions deserve a second opinion, and learned what causes smoke detectors to chirp incessantly. I surmised that our smoke detector had a dust problem resulting from the sanding and refinishing of our now mud-tested hardwood floors. I cleaned the sensor, replaced the battery, climbed my new ladder, replaced the smoke alarm like the missing piece of life's great puzzle, and waited atop my ladder for the possible resurrection of the chirp. The sound of silence once again reigned in my home.
Now I had to decide what to do with Ranger and the layer of topsoil he wore upon his fur. The old putdown, "Up your nose with a rubber hose" comes close to describing the next half hour of Ranger's life--that's three-and-a half hours in dog time. I drug my garden hose from under my house, turned the spigot on full, set the nozzle for "laser beam stream of water" and removed the mud from my granddog through the geological process known as erosion. He didn't like the cold water. He actually snapped at the stream of water a couple of times as though he could frighten it away, but my heart was colder than the water. He was hosed down until he finally came clean. That's when he got water "up his nose from a garden hose."
As I folded up my new eight-foot ladder and carried it up the staircase to our storage room, the ladder nudged one of the pictures that line the staircase, sending it crashing down the stairs, behind the grandfather clock before coming to a stop with a few small pieces of the frame missing. That picture was not the one of my oldest child or my youngest, but the owner of the dog that can't handle a chirp. (That child's portrait is now in traction undergoing wood glue therapy).
If you hear chirping today, I sincerely hope it is that of songbirds rendering their ethereal melodies while perched in the trees outside your happy home. And if you're asked to doggy-sit for someone you love, keep your back door dead-bolted and your garden hose handy.
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