W. BRUCE CAMERON - If My Mom Fell in the Yard And There Was No One There to Hear It ...

My father is worried my mother might fall down in the yard while he’s watching TV because there’s no way to guarantee it would happen during a commercial. My mother isn’t as concerned, because she has fallen a couple of times before and didn’t like it. Apparently, she believes she has developed an aversion.

A dutiful and caring son, I’m worried, too — and my solution is that they should both go live with my sister. My sister says this is fine as long as she can simultaneously move in with me. Otherwise, she doesn’t think it makes sense for my parents to live with her because she’d wind up needing rehab.

“That’s just silly,” I respond. “There were years and years of your life when you lived with your parents, and you didn’t drink anything then.”

“Right. That’s why I’m in therapy,” she says.

My dad’s brilliant idea is that my mother should never go anywhere without their dog, Nick. If something were to happen, Nick would show up at the door and bark in a “hey, your wife just fell down in the yard” sort of fashion. Thus alerted, my father would get up and go save my mother as soon as the game ended.

“Why would I fall?” my mother demands, as if people need a persuasive reason.

Nick is a robust Labrador who actually weighs more than my mother. If my mom is holding the leash when the dog spots a squirrel, he’ll yank her skeleton right out of her body. I guess my father thinks that rather than worry about her falling, we should just make sure she does. That way, when he gets up to go see where she is, it will be for a good reason. He’d hate to make a trip to the door for nothing.

“You’d fall because Nick the Safety Dog would pull you to the ground and drag you through the grass,” I tell my mother.

My mother fell because she’s always running places, in a hurry because her physical therapy from her last tumble has put her behind schedule. She’s been retired for more than a decade and has never been more stressed.

“You need to slow down. Smell the roses,” my father tells her.

(The last time my mother fell, it was in the rose bushes.)

My mother’s idea is that we should issue her a .38-caliber pistol. If she falls, she can attract my father’s attention by firing bullets into the house. My father says that’s fine, but he wants a Tommy gun so he can signal back.

To test the theory that Nick the Wonder Dog would save my mother, my parents simulated an emergency by having my mother lie down in the driveway. This excited Nick, who licked her face and then grabbed a stick and paraded around the yard with it.

“Save me, Nick!” my mom cried.

Nick next pounced on a tennis ball. Surely she would stand back up once she realized he had such a tantalizing toy in his mouth! He danced up close, pretending to have trouble hanging onto it. It dropped onto her chest with a wet splat, and he backed up, staring at it, quivering.

“Nick, go get your father!” she instructed. “Get help! Get help!”

Nick probably doesn’t believe that my dad is his father. Nor is he likely to believe that anyone could possibly need more help than having a slobbery tennis ball handed to her by a dog.

My father, meanwhile, had grown impatient and was standing at the door, peering out the window.

“This isn’t working!”, my mom shouted at him.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” he yelled back, opening the door. Nick snatched the tennis ball and ran up to my father with it. “Good boy, Nick,” my father said. He threw the tennis ball and claims he did not try to hit my mother with it.

“If I’d wanted to, I would have hit her,” he explains.

“You did hit me!” my mom shouts.

“On the bounce,” my dad says. Apparently, you don’t get points for that.

So we’re still searching for a solution to the problem.

Hopefully, we’ll find one that doesn’t involve gunfire.

To write Bruce Cameron, visit his website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com.