There was the Mother’s Day of the Butt Crack and the pile of dog poop; there was the Mother’s Day of rescuing the family from an auto accident on the San Mateo Bridge, and there was the Mother’s Day of the Peeping Tom.

When we started comparing notes with the neighbors later, many of them reported seeing collections of cigarette butts on the ground just outside their bedroom windows.  But nobody in the neighborhood knew what was going on until he zeroed in on our house.

*

Marianne’s house had a semi-circular gravel driveway which passed by the front bedroom and the living room before looping back out onto the street.  Late one evening as we lay in bed, lights still on, we heard the crunch, crunch, crunch of footsteps coming down the driveway and stopping.  I got up and put on a robe.

“Don’t go out there,” Marianne cautioned.  “You don’t know who it is.”  “Aaahhhh,” I said, dismissively.

*

I tend to do stupid things like that.

My office parking lot is sandwiched between two buildings, so most of the lot isn’t visible from the street unless you are directly in front of its entrance.  A couple of years earlier, I watched out of my office window in fascination as two scruffy-looking types in a nondescript car backed into my lot, waited a while, pulled forward towards the street, looked up and down the street and then backed up again.  This happened two or three times, and it was obvious the guys were hiding, but also looking for something – or someone – to come along.

I couldn’t take it any more, so I left my office and walked up to the passenger side of the car.  “Hi, guys.  What’s the cops-and-robbers game?”

“Who wants to know?”  “This is my office and my building.  I think you guys better take a hike before I call the sheriff.”  “Mister, we are the sheriff.  This is a stakeout and you’re in the way.”  “Ri-i-i-ght.  What are your names?”

So they told me their names and ranks and I walked into the insurance office at the back end of my building to use their phone to call the sheriff’s office.  It took a while to verify, since the desk sergeant was rightly suspicious of a stranger calling to ask if two of his deputies were on an undercover stakeout.  Finally, however, he confirmed that they were legit and warned me to leave them alone.

“I can’t freakin’ believe you just did that, Dimick,” said Jim the insurance broker.  “You’ve got more balls than brains!”

“And I have more life insurance than either,” I retorted.

*

I tend to do stupid things like that.

Marianne breeds dogs for Canine Companions for Independence, the organization out of Santa Rosa that trains service dogs for placement with people with disabilities.  CCI has a number of select “breeder caretakers,” who agree to take a breeding bitch and raise her litters.  The CCI folks, with the help of their geneticists and their extensive database, decide whom the bitch will be mated with and all the pups are delivered back to Santa Rosa at eight weeks.

The organization also has a lengthy roster of “puppy raisers” who take the eight-week-old puppies into their homes and train them for 14 to 16 months before they are turned back in to begin their advance training.  The requirements for graduation, and placement with a handicapped person, are so strict that only about 30% of the pups end up as service dogs.

Our current breeder is a golden retriever, whose first litter totaled 11 pups.  Quite a chore at feeding time, as a dog only has ten nipples.  Three weeks ago, when the pups were eight weeks old, we packed them all into the back of my son-in-law’s pickup and headed off for CCI’s Santa Rosa campus.  About an hour north of home, traffic came to a complete stop on the freeway and we were making maybe half a mile an hour, but couldn’t see ahead of us to what the holdup was.

It turned out to be an overturned big rig blocking all three freeway lanes a few miles up ahead, and the Highway Patrol was diverting traffic onto a freeway off ramp and onto the surface roads.  But we didn’t know that at the time.

I couldn’t take it anymore, so I stepped out of the pickup and began to stroll along the center median up towards the CHP cars.  Suddenly, a black-and-white came speeding towards me on the median, screeched to a halt and disgorged a twenty-something officer with a God complex.

“DO YOU WANT TO GO TO JAIL???” he screamed at me.  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING???”

I’ve often heard somebody described as “almost foaming at the mouth,” but I’d never actually seen one before.

“No harm, officer,” I said.  “Just want to see what’s going on.”

“DO YOU WANT TO GO TO JAIL??!!” he demanded again.  “GET BACK TO YOUR CAR!”

“Okay, okay, okay,” I obliged, raising my hands above my head in mock surrender and turning around.  The threat of going to jail was, of course, bullshit, since I was guilty of an infraction, at most.  But I turned around and headed back to the truck, walking on the grassy median.

“GET OFF THE MEDIAN!”  I moved off the median onto the pavement.  “GET OFF THE FREEWAY!”  I moved off of the pavement back onto the grass.

I wondered how I could get back to the truck without walking on either the freeway or the median, but knew better than to argue, as I might have in other circumstances.  This kid was so wound up that it was entirely possible that an “accident” could have happened to me while “resisting arrest” or “trying to escape.”

“I can’t freakin’ believe you just did that,” Mark said when I got back into the truck.

Twenty minutes later, when we finally got up to the barrier and passed the boy cop, I gave him a friendly wave.

*

But I was writing about Mother’s Day.

*

I opened the front door and stepped out onto the curved driveway, quickly enough that the guy didn’t have time to run.

“Can I help you with something?”

“Oh…ah…I…ah…just needed to take a leak so I…ah…thought I’d hide behind your bushes.”

“Well, go do it someplace else.”  “Okay.  I’m sorry.  Didn’t mean to disturb you.”

Nothing really struck me as suspicious yet.  But 30 or 45 minutes later, lights out now, we were just dozing off when we heard it again: crunch…crunch…crunch.  Footsteps coming down the gravel driveway.

Marianne, who had been suspicious from the beginning, decided to call the cops.  And so, five minutes later, up the street with sirens blasting, CB radios blaring and gumball-machine lights flashing, came a contingent of sheriff’s patrol units.

It must have been a slow night for crime.

What with all the commotion, we missed the sound of his escape, although we did hear the dogs barking in the back yard and later pieced together that he had jumped the front fence into the back yard, jumped the back fence into the neighbor’s yard and either hid there or kept jumping until he was in the clear.

So the deputies took the report, together with my vague description of the perp and we tried again to go to sleep.  Anger and adrenalin made sure neither one of us was particularly sleepy, so we were still awake when, half an hour later, we heard the crunch…crunch…crunch.

Now I was really pissed, but a warning hadn’t worked and the sheriffs were useless so I did the most logical thing I could think of.  I spread open the slats of the mini blinds, pressed my face hard against the window pane and let out the most blood-curdling scream I could muster:

“AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!”

He ran like hell and never bothered us again.