How To Panic
First, take the only existing set of keys to the SUV and lock them in the SUV. Make sure the house key is with them. Make sure your laptop, your phone, your life, your soul, your identity, the original plans to the Death Star, Jimmy Hoffa, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and your wallet is also in there.
Next, have your wife step outside the front door right then and ask, “Honey, will you go pick up Beta Male from soccer practice?”
Next, be the picture of calm restraint and say, “Um. Yes. But I’ll need your car keys because I just locked mine in my car.” When she responds with, “Oh. No.” (because you both just realize that seven years getting away with that single key just saw its pitiful end), you just go, “I’ll figure it out later,” and you go pick up child from soccer practice.
Next, at the soccer practice field, look for child for Typical Minute Where You Should See Him because the entire 4 – 12 year old population of America is running around.
After the Typical Minute Where You Should Have Seen Him, the brain goes into Hm Mode.
After Hm Mode, the eyes narrow ever so slightly and the Relaxed Casual Parent Adrenal System prepares to dump eight and a half cubic tons of Panic into the bloodstream.
But the first sign of this comes in the form of Eyes Narrow Ever So Slightly because now you’re in Hawk Mode. Hawk Mode is recruited with Nuclear Face Recognition Software Version 10 Million right after Hm Mode has been exhausted in order to instantaneously observe, sift, categorize and determine presence of Could Be Missing Child every potential candidate (read: every child within a 900-mile radius).
All women are born with this because they all come out of the box hooked up via Advanced DNA-Fusion Reactors into the Universal Uterus. If there is a missing kid, for even 28 seconds, every mom in the world instantly goes into 24/7 Red Alert.
All men are not born with this. But the first time it happens to any man, that man grows a uterus on the spot. It’s just how it is, I don’t make the rules so take your complaint somewhere else, boys.
After Hawk Mode comes up with No Results, the space of time between Levelheaded Calm to Abject Panic Over Obscene Plausible Outcomes is in direct proportion to the current content of your bowels.
By the fourth phone call back and forth between myself and Cute Redhead, our voices betraying all of the above without ever having to explain a single bit of it, I have traversed this entire continuum no less than five times. Each phone call devolved into Quicker, Quieter, and Hold It Together. We are full tilt into:
He’s Been Gone For 45 Minutes And Nobody Has Seen Him mode.
I have run up and down the entire soccer field. That is, fields. That is, a 747 could land on this stretch of greenbelt and I’m not kidding. I see other parents and my grim courtesy to their “Hey Todd, sup?” immediately conveys to them Something’s Not Right. Urgency fans out, rippled-effect and clairvoyant. Parents are called. Nothing. Coach is called. Nothing.
End With: Wife calls.
“…Stop. He’s here. He’s home. I don’t know when he got here or how. But he’s okay.”
Say nothing until I’m certain I can say it with no indication that the relief of those words has a lump in my throat, because I hate crying, even in front of her.
Exhale. “Okay. Good. Okay, I’ll be home in a few minutes.”
Drive home nearly intoxicated with Thank God.
Not much more to waste time articulating, because it can’t be articulated. Just stare straight ahead and let the Obscene Plausible know it can clear the room, and clear your mind. Just stare.
And Thank God.
Then.
When you get home to have your wife say, “Ha ha. We can laugh about it now, ha ha. Can you believe I actually HAD a whole conversation with him thirty minutes ago and DON’T EVEN REMEMBER IT?? Ha ha!”
“Um. What?”
That photo up there?
That’s me thinking, “…did you really, honest-to-God-in-heaven…just put me…through all tha—DO YOU REALIZE I WAS FLYING F-L-Y-I-N-G AROUND THIS NEIGHBORHOOD LOOKING FOR PEDOPHILES, SERIAL KILLERS, AN—?!?”
And she goes (and I promise I am not making this up): “Ha. Yeah.”
And that’s why I started drinking at 4 in the afternoon, and I’m not making that up either.
FALCON!? Where are you???? LOL
lol I actually took out a paragraph referring to exactly that, Jaci. Not twenty-four hours after, and I figured we’d all heard enough :)
and you wonder why I was the 3rd person in five minutes to TXT you yesterday.
(BTY, I think JANE should be responsible for getting the locked keys out after all that)