It's never a good thing to close your eyes and duck while driving a car.
Yet that's what I did Friday night. Folks, this weekend Marlin Perkins (were he still alive) would have LOVED being in our 'hood.
It was a dark and calm night. Kelsey had a Sunday school class social halfway across town. Jimmy was on massive may-cause-drowsiness antihistamines/histamine-blockers (whatever), meaning he was sitting in his recliner in a near-coma state. The boys were watching new episodes of the Penguins of Madagascar and building Lego-based instruments of destruction in the playroom.
I had cooked dinner, taken Kelsey to the social (where she rather unceremoniously forbade me to walk her to the door in a scarily teenage tone... I'm not bitter, much), swung by the HT to pick up a few things for our traditional Saturday big breakfast, run into a friend and chatted long enough to ruin her ice cream and give her an idea for a new business, come home and unpacked the groceries and eaten dinner (in four minutes), and gone back halfway across town to pick up Kelsey from said social event.
We had a rather uneventful trip home. Until we turned onto the main street running through our neighborhood. As we breezed down the road, I caught sight of a massive grayish whitish object heading towards our car from the left. It had brownish speckles mixed in. It was flying through the air, and just before I closed my eyes, I saw it directly in front of the windshield. Wings spanning the entire width of the front glass. Body, somewhere around two feet tall and rather thick. Then I closed my eyes, ducked down, and hit the brakes. I have no idea what I thought the ducking would accomplish. Nor closing my eyes while I was driving. There may have been screams, too.
Thankfully we didn't hit it or anything else.
At first I though it was a hawk. There are hawks around. But hawks are pretty much daytime critters. This one was definitely a nocturnal predator. As my heard rate dropped from one of the better cardio bursts I've had in a while, I realized: owl.
Kelsey and I shook and shrieked and described the encounter, loudly, the rest of the way home. We pulled into the driveway and just sat. Neither of us wanted to get out of the car, but finally I laughed and said, "I'm not scared. Come on. I have to walk around the car. You, at least, have a straight shot out your door to the house." So I got out and started walking around the back of the Suburban. About the time I got even with the license tag on the back, swoop, another grayish whitish feathery bird with brownish speckles came barrelling by. Kelsey was on the porch, I screamed and ran to the porch, and we both lunged inside.
I woke Jimmy and had him take Pepper out before bed, not wanting her to end up as an appetizer.
Except for the odd dreams about being chased by owls, thus ends Close Encounter #2 in the saga of life in Wyld Kingdome.
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