2 a.m. Terror

I dozed off on the couch last night … at 9 p.m. Obviously I was tuckered out. So I trundled off to bed and quickly fell into a heavy slumber. Around 2 a.m., I awoke ­– startled – to a terrible, horrifying, deep-throated, loud, rattling, choking sound. I sat up. The sound was coming from downstairs. My mind raced and quickly came up with a likely reason for the awful noise. Grover (my cat) must be choking on the mother of all hairballs, or even worse, being strangled in the blinds. Since Grover never once has had a hairball, I dismissed that theory and immediately thought the worst: my precious pet was in peril!

I sprang from the bed and dashed through the darkness to aid my ensnared feline. But as I reached the bedroom doorway, I heard the teeniest, sleepiest, cutest “meow” coming from the corner of the bedroom where Grover enjoys napping. “What’s the ruckus all about and why did you have to wake me up?” the kitty communicated with the little squeak. My sleepy mind raced. If Grover was OK (whew!), what on earth was that awful racket coming from downstairs?

I came to the obvious conclusion. Someone had broken into our house and was now having a heart attack and dying on my kitchen floor.

I froze in the doorway, thinking a thousand jumbled thoughts: Steve’s not here. What am I going to do? If he (the burglar) is having a heart attack, he can’t be that dangerous. I should go downstairs and make sure there actually is a burglar and make sure he actually is dying – then I can call 911. No wait! If for some reason he isn’t dying, just hacking up a lung or something, he might be dangerous. I need a weapon. And my cell phone.

As I stood in doorway and contemplated weapon choices (Where was that mini baseball bat?), again I heard the violent, scraping, snarlish, ear-racking noise. Except it wasn’t coming from downstairs.

It was coming from the guest bedroom – just down the hallway.

And that’s when the light bulb turned on. My mother-in-law, whose faults are very few, was nearly ripping the paint off the walls with the ferocity of her snores.

Giggling, both at the impossibility of such a lovely human being able to make such a horrific, explosive sound (and not wake up!) and at my comical cognitive reaction, I shut my bedroom door and tiptoed back bed.

After all, I had four hours to sleep until my alarm went off.