I almost gave my mother a stroke last night.

Does anybody else out there know the James Thurber story "The Night the Bed Fell"? Even though that story, about a series of assuptions and wild coincidences that takes place in a family home, always struck me as funny, it didn't strike me as unusual. Not only do I have a bunch of unusual happenings and coincidences in my life, but my entire family is like this....and, you get me and my mother together ( to say nothing of the stuff that used to happen when my grandmother was living )...we're just plain weird.

This is what happened...

Last night, even though it was 11:00, I still felt that I had not gotten enough done that day, so I decided to toss some Avon catalogs into paper boxes in my mother's neighborhood. I already made some personal contacts on her street, so I didn't feel bad about chucking brochures into paper boxes, especially of those folks who said they didn't mind getting them.

However, this is a quiet, residential cul-de-sac. I didn't want to just park at the top of the street and look like a "suspicious vehicle"....especially with homeland security being what it is and the state of Maryland having made certain kinds of fireworks legal. With my luck some concerned citizen would blow up my car with a leftover stick of dynamite.

So, naturally, I parked in front of my mother's house, but I didn't want to disturb her since she usually goes to bed about that time of night. I closed the car door quietly, but saw that she was in the kitchen, right by the door. She turned the both of the outside lights on. OhI thought, She sees me or at least heard the door slam. As I walked up to the door, I could see that she was looking down at the floor, kicking something with her toe. I thought maybe a rug had gotten caught under the door or something. But I reached the door right as she, still looking down, opened it.

"Hi Mom!" I said.

At which point she drew in her breath sharply, reeled back against the counter, and closed her eyes with both of her hands over her heart as if trying to keep it in her chest. All of the color drained out of her face. I honestly thought that she was going to pass out. Luckily, neither of us scream when we are startled or upset, otherwise we'd have woken up the whole neighborhood.

She hadn't seen me at all. What she had seen, as she was getting ready for bed, were these beetles that seem to have gotten into her house, and what she was doing was opening the door to let two of them out.

Now, I ask you, what are the chances of a woman opening a door to let a bug out at the exact moment her daughter is coming by with Avon catalogs at 11:00 at night?!

Luckily, my mom recovered from her shock "You're so darn QUIET Tea!" she admonished me. "Can't you make more noise when you walk?" She has a point. I tread so lightly I would routinely scare whoever was the newsest file clerk when I worked at GMAC. And once, while wearing a grey fuzzy sweater, I startled one of my co-workers into screaming at the top of her lungs. She had just had to put her dog, who was roughly the same color as my sweater, to sleep the day before, and I sidled up to her to ask her a question. I was literally an inch from her, about to hand her a file, when she saw my sweater out of the corner of her eye and thought her dog had come back to haunt her.

Anyway, the upshot of the whole thing is that my mother's house is being invaded by beetles and I got a nasty phone call from a woman who got a catalog who didn't want one: I guess I threw it in the wrong paper box. It's DARK out here in the County!

Jeepers Crow, sometimes the only reason I get up in the morning is to see what's going to happen next.