The Freedom Lap: Monday Ramblings

I will also correct my above statement in saying…

that I almost lost her.

You thought I was going to correct the womb part, didn’t you?

WRONG!

Can’t you see the resemblance????

We have this gate in our backyard, and it’s not the nicest, and we have to tie this rope and clamp it to keep it shut. I remember asking Sammy in the early days, this thing is annoying, do we really have to keep it on the gate every time we open it? He said yes we do because the dogs can get out by pushing it open.

Now, I’m not gonna bother to go on at this point about WHICH one of us left the gate open…

But it was the single scariest moment of my entire life when I went outside to see an empty yard and an open gate.

And oh by the way, it wasn’t me.

I hope none of the neighbors were in any way watching me during this five minute period of absolute horror as I started making a lot of weird sounds that were a mix between hysterical crying and hyperventilation. I started throwing things around the house because I couldn’t find my keys that I had in my hand about two minutes earlier. I was trying to stay on my feet and think rationally. We don’t live too far from a main road and all I could think about was that she could have been hit by a car and I’d have to find her little squished red body.

I started by driving through the neighborhood with all the car windows open calling her.

But I was also hyperventilating and still hysterical, so there were plenty more weird noises I was surely making as the neighbors watched.

I first saw a little family of three on bikes. I pulled up and tried to ask if they’d seen her, in between gasps for air and crying. They told me that they had not but they would be on the lookout, and as I pulled away I heard their young son say to them, “we have GOT to find that dog!” I laughed in between cries and am sending this little dude a GIANT air hug right this second as I remember his ferocity in wanting to help me. That kid is gonna do big things.

I kept driving along the route we walk through the neighborhood thinking maybe she followed the scent from our tracks. I came across another mother and her little girl, and I really think I might have scared this little one a bit with my hysterics because she couldn’t take her eyes off of my frantic and tear-stained face. This woman was amazing, asked me if I had posted it on our neighborhood website yet, and she RAN inside to do this for me when I said I had not.

Then I drove the main road, white knuckling the steering wheel. Please don’t be hit by a car, please don’t be hit by a car…

Still nothing.

I drove back onto my street, defeated, and I saw a woman walking a dog down the street.

As I got closer, I thought this dog looks like Georgia….

IT IS GEORGIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And I pulled up to her on the wrong side of the road, because y’all can imagine how many fucks I had on my person at the time about such things. I was alarmingly low on fucks to give, in other words. I was actually in the red for my available fucks. The fuck sharks were coming after me like, “hey kid, ya owe me 5,000 Big Ones by sundown or I’ll break ya legs; produce the fucks, and you’ll walk away unharmed.”

You get it.

She was kind of wet and pretty dirty, so she obviously had enjoyed her time playing with our neighbor’s dog in their creek, which I later found out from the nice lady that took her in and walked her up and down the street hoping I’d see her.

Good.

I hope she enjoyed the Freedom Lap.

Because it was the first and the last one she’s ever gonna get, if I can help it.

I hugged her no less than 2394820348230948 million times yesterday as I sat on the floor trying to calm down, while she licked the tears off my face. That’s my girl, right there.

In all of this madness, I managed to make some phone calls, only one that was on purpose, and that was to Sammy. Is it crazy weird that when you are making these unimaginable moaning sounds from hyperventilating and sheer despair, you can manage to butt dial not one, but TWO people?

One, I called my friend Kelly. Sorry about that, boo. Hope you didn’t answer and hear these noises, but I would have assumed you would have called me by now to ask me WTF that was if you did.

Two, I called the RADIO STATION that I waste at least an hour of cell phone minutes on every Thursday by calling to try and win free concert tickets. And THEY ANSWERED. More strange sounds from me on my end, I’m sure, but I finally managed to hang up on him. I’d love to know his thoughts on the call he got yesterday, but I guess we’ll never really know if he thought it was a hyena or maybe some kind of majestic bird calling out to him from afar on the other end. Either way, I am quite sure he wouldn’t have pinpointed it as human.

Sammy came home as soon as I made my third phone call to him which was just I needed. Without him, I wouldn’t have gotten to have all the laughs that I did that really evened out the whole day in the best kind of way.

I was standing in my front yard chatting with my neighbor a little while later when she noticed that the little dog that lives across the street from me had just wandered outside of his house. (What was it about dogs on the loose yesterday??) She was able to put him back inside and he didn’t get lost, this time, but it felt good that after what had just happened to me, we kind of got to turn it around and save someone else’s dog, even if my neighbor really did all the work 🙂

After all of this relief, it was time to feed the Hungry Horror.

(That’s me, for anyone wondering.)

We ordered pizza and stopped at the grocery store on the way to go pick it up where Sammy and I treated ourselves to some delicious cream soda (still better than Mountain Dew, right?) and of course, because someone keeps letting the two of us in the grocery store unchaperoned for some reason, there was chocolate cake.

The third, and final, item we grabbed was a nice package of poo bags for picking up after the dogs. This is the type of randomness that goes down when the two of us live a mere 0.4 miles from a grocery store: we walk in no less than four times a week to grab must-have, life -depending items, such as cream sodas, chocolate cake, and shit bags, ONLY.

Also, a super helpful tip from me to you: be wary when operating a motor vehicle on a busy road while sipping on an open container of cream soda. It tends to looks remarkably like an adult beverage and can mistakenly get you pulled over by the cops.

#whenwhitepeopledrive

(I must credit Sammy with the above hashtag but it had me laughing SO HARD.)

Back to the grocery store. As we did our thing at the self-checkout, JUST as I was about to walk away, I noticed a $20 bill just sitting in the slot all vulnerable-like and lonely, where someone had gotten cash back and forgot to take it.

As all the possible things I could and should do ran through my head, I settled on taking it with me and giving it a good temporary home in my purse. I could do better things with it than the checkout attendant just sticking it back in the cash drawer, right?

As a smile formed across my face and I gripped my prize, I walked out of the store and exclaimed, “THANKS, UNIVERSE!”

I had gone through this terrifying, awful day filled with this  anxious energy that I threw out into the machine, and it was spit back out at me with a “cha-ching!” in the form of a crisp, green bill with Andrew Jackson’s mug on it. I’ll take it!

I really felt like I deserved this after losing my child in the middle of Coyote City for a portion of the day. I laughed, I cried, I re-upped my personal arsenal of fucks to give, and I moved on to see what the next day brings.

All in all, the day worked out in my favor, but may your Monday be better than the Monday of the Freedom Lap…. at least my end of it 😉

—Monday ramblings, thanks for listening!