Homeland Security

Some of you will be surprised to learn we have a gun. In the house. Just in case.

If a robber makes it past the hound-in-husky-clothing who guards our citadel, we have Plan B. But we're not taking any chances in the safety department. Plan B is locked in a strongbox in the second floor TV room closet. The bullets which integrate with Plan B are stashed in my husband's office at the back of the bottom file cabinet. Or maybe it's the top. Anyway, the key to the strongbox is...well, I can't remember exactly where the key is. But I'm sure my husband knows.

So we're set. The right to arm bears. Or something to that effect.

The gun belonged to my father, a souvenir from WWII. It's a black handgun, probably collectible. It sits in a little black case on a foam mattress. Like that egg-carton stuff you put between the mattress pad and the mattress, to enhance your sleep experience.

When my father died, we inherited the strongbox. In it we found the gun, along with a box of bullets, a stack of papers and photographs from the Old Country including my grandmother's 1899 passport, my father's WWII induction notice and consequent honorable discharge, and a dozen notebooks containing detailed lists of household expenditures written in his precise hand, beginning in 1946 and continuing up through the week prior to his first stroke in 1992.

My middle name means "anal" in the Old Country. I'm named after my father.

To enhance our safety experience, we decided to keep the gun. Though we needn't have bothered. At least not while the aforementioned dog continues to draw breath. That is, most people seeing her on the street assume she's a dog. In fact, she's an elaborately designed central alarm system, disguised to resemble a dog.

A casual passerby on the sidewalk who, for a nanosecond, lets her shoe brush against a stray blade of grass at the edge of our front lawn, can trigger a full-scale response from the alarm system, which can be heard through lead. Like Superman. The mail carrier -- not to mention the housekeeper and the occasional repairperson -- has taken to wearing earplugs.

Once my daughter and I rolled three humongous snowballs in the front yard and, unable to stack them, lined them up and stuck arms on each one and called it a day. The alarm system, which had been imitating a sleep state beside the fireplace, rose and stretched and ambled over to the window, whereupon it went into emergency overdrive until I was forced to dismantle the three anatomically-challenged creatures out in the yard to save my overstressed auditory nerve, not to mention my psyche.

A robber wouldn't stand a snowball's chance at our hacienda.

Truth be told, we really don't have much worth robbing. Our primary television is over twenty years old and has an elusive waver in the center of the image such that everything appears to be doing the hula. Including buildings and golf courses. No wonder Tiger's in a slump. He should quit playing on our TV.

The only jewelry of any value is located on my fingers, from which you would have to pry it when they are cold and dead. Or something to that effect. Computer-wise our daughter is the mark in this household, but then you'd have to find your way to it through the No-Man's-Land of her room, an undertaking any robber worth his salt would surely forego. In fact, if a robber actually managed to succeed in this quest, I'd be tempted to give him one of her gymnastics medals as a reward. But only a third-place. And only after he was behind bars.

Which is one of my favorite places to be, behind bars. It started in childhood, when my father built a knotty-pine bar down in the rec room to better accommodate his monthly poker nights. When not in its intended use, the orange formica bartop served as a building site for my elaborately constructed Barbie houses utilizing encyclopedias and empty La Palina boxes. After my father's death, I came upon one of these old boxes while going through his things. It no longer contained cigars, but small cartons of staples. I never found the stapler.

Which is sort of like finding the bullets, and not the gun. The egg before the chicken. Or something to that effect.