"Back in the day" when I used to watch TV I would use it to lull myself to sleep, or to pass the time when I couldn't sleep. My ex and I divorced in 1992 and the following August I bought a house in Lake Capri, a quiet community of mostly older folks who had moved there in the 1970's and 1980's to retire. Atlanta suburban sprawl had caught up to this part of Rockdale County and now it was just another suburban neighborhood. I loved the area with its spring-fed lakes and walking trails, and I liked the house.
My older daughter, a senior in high school, moved in with her father, and my younger daughter stayed with me. Our house had two bedrooms upstairs that shared a large bathroom and, on the weekends when my older daughter came to stay, the girls could have all the privacy up there they wanted. The master bedroom was downstairs and I could also have all the privacy I wanted and needed at that time. The house had a large fenced yard and the girls' two dogs lived back there. Snoopy and Jodi were two mutts that the girls adopted at the pound when both dogs were just puppies. Snoopy was a black chow-mix and Jodi was a huge hairy collie-shephard-and-something-else mix. The dogs were my responsibility (problem) now as they were older and the girls had moved on to bigger and better things.
One winter night I could not sleep and I was channel-surfing, clicking from one station to another, looking for something, anything to watch. I had put the dogs into our large utility shed because it was going to be below freezing that night. Melissa was asleep upstairs (or so I thought) and Mary Lee was at her dad's. I was in the divorcee's typical sexy nighttime outfit - an over-sized tee-shirt and panties. Click. Click. SCREAM. I jumped and clicked. One of the channels must have had on a horror movie and I clicked on it just as some poor victim let out a bloodcurdling scream. It gave me shivers and I made a note to skip that channel if I surfed near it again. Click. Click. What's that? Boring. Click. Click.
Let's change the point of view. My daughter Melissa, who was 13 or 14 at the time, was upstairs just dozing off when a bloodcurdling scream woke her. She froze in her bed as the scream was cut off! MOM!?! She listened and heard nothing. O MY GOD! Had something happened to Mom? She reached for her phone and pulled it under the covers with her. 9-1-1. She told the operator that she had heard her mother scream downstairs and she thought someone was in the house. The operator immediately dispatched two deputies to the address and kept Melissa on the phone. Was there any way she could get out of the house? No, the stairs and front door were by her mother's room. Was her bedroom door locked? No, yes, maybe, sometimes it didn't lock all the way. Did she want to check? No! She was too scared to even get out of bed. For all she knew her Mom was dead and someone was coming up the stairs to get her! The operator tried to calm her and kept her on the phone while the police hurried to our address.
Point of view shift: Mom is watching some stupid movie or program downstairs totally unaware of what is going on in her daughter's room. All of a sudden she sees lights dancing on the wall outside of her bedroom door. Mom rubs her eyes; the lights are still there. It looks like someone is shining a flashlight through her living room windows. Holy crap! Someone is trying to break in! Mom is terrified! She mutes the TV and slowly climbs out of bed looking for a weapon. Nothing! She tiptoes to her bedroom door and peers around the wall into the living room. There are two people standing at her front door shining flashlights through the window! One of them raps on the door and says, "Ma'am! Police! Can you come to the door?"
Police?
"Just a minute!" she says. She stumbles to the door and slides back the latch. She hears her daughter's bedroom door slam open and her daughter stampedes down the stairs saying, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Mom, I'm so sorry!"
Mom opens the door to the police who are relieved that we are both all right, but supremely aggravated that, in checking out the house before approaching the front door, they had heard noises around back and opened the utility door. The two excited dogs had bounded out, jumped all over them, and had run away. My daughter apologized for calling 9-1-1 and they were very kind to her and told her she did the right thing. I was mortified to be standing there in an over-sized tee-shirt, wild hair, and clueless. They apologized for releasing the dogs, and made a halfhearted attempt at rounding them up before they gave up and drove away. Melissa ran back upstairs and fell asleep. I put on some sweatpants and a jacket and retrieved the dogs.
