Moments of Lucidity

                    MOMENTS OF LUCIDITY

                                              Big Gold Caddy

There may be a warrant out for my arrest. Or a BOLO (Don’t you just love that sexy cop talk? I owe it all to Rizzoli and Isles.)

If I’m jailed over this little episode, Sherry had better come and bail me out. After all, it was her fault. Well, sort of.

She told me to follow her and then she didn’t wait for me. Or maybe I couldn’t catch up with her. Anyway, whose fault is it that I wound up in the middle of a mobile home community parked in front of some stranger’s house?

We met at a restaurant off Teasley Lane for dinner. Then we planned to caravan to her house in Robson Ranch to watch a movie on her maxi-screen TV.

“I’m going to take a back way home,” she said. “You won’t get lost if you follow me. Oh, and I’m going to stop at the Kroger for gas on the way.”

So I followed her to the supermarket and waited to one side while she gassed up. A gaggle of drivers queued up behind me, and I finally realized they thought I was in line for the pumps. Imagine their chagrin when Sherry pulled away and I nosed my car behind her back bumper to make the turn back onto Teasley. It’s a wonder they didn’t all follow. We’d have looked like a funeral procession until people started running out of gas.

She pulled out. Then a car sped by. Then a big old honking truck stopped on the side of the street, blocking my view. I finally made it onto the roadway and got behind her gold Cadillac as she made her way back up the street. We drove a few blocks that way, her heading steadily uptown and me wondering exactly where this back way was taking us.

Then she made a left turn and I let a car go by and then hot-pedaled it after her. This was a strange way to get to the Ranch, I thought, but I followed dutifully behind the big gold sedan.

I looked around me. We appeared to be traversing the winding streets of a mobile home park. That ditsy woman, I thought. She’s gotten us lost!

Finally the Caddy pulled over to the curb. I pulled in behind and waited for her to walk back to my window to explain how she’d made a bad turn. I couldn’t wait to see how she tried to get out of this one. She is never wrong, you see. In all our years of friendship she has never admitted to erring.

“I thought I was wrong once,” she likes to say. “But I was mistaken.”

OK. She never said that. I made it up. But still, I know an attitude when I see one.

The big gold car sat there in front of that mobile home a bit. She was taking her time with the excuses, I thought. Finally, the driver’s door opened. Then the passenger door opened. Then the back passenger door. Three strangers got out and stared at me!

I sat there stunned, trying to figure out what they had done with Sherry. Then I realized that the Cadillac crest was not on the trunk of the car. Not only did they kidnap my friend, they changed her car into a Lincoln, I thought.

They stared and I stared. Then I simply put the Infinity in gear and pulled out from the curb. I drove sedately away, ignoring their puzzled looks and the woman’s hurried grab for her cell phone. I could see her lips moving as she read my license plate number to the dispatcher. I imagined I heard sirens in the distance.

I drove all the way to the front of the, yes, mobile home community, before I slowed. Then I dialed Sherry’s number. She was laughing so hard I could barely understand her.

“I was sitting in the left-turn lane back there at the light when I saw you go by,” she giggled. Then I saw that you were following that big gold sedan, and I figured it might be hours before you noticed it wasn’t me, depending on whether they were going to Oklahoma City.”

Anyone could have made a mistake like that. I hadn’t even had anything to drink, officer, well…except for that one tiny margarita. And no matter what that family says, I was not casing their place for a burglary.

If they put my picture on the wall in the post office, I hope they at least photo shop away the laugh lines around my eyes.