Panic!

Some people will do anything to avoid taking the truck into the shop. This truck was parked next to me in a dock in Chicago. First time I've ever seen a truck with stitches.

In case you can't tell, this is the drivers side front fender right behind the wheel. The damage is a split, due to some accident I'm sure, in the fiberglass fender well. I'm hoping this was a temporary repair, but it looked like it'd been there a while. What he did was drill holes on either side of the split and then some Zip Ties through the holes to keep the split together. Pretty smart actually, but like I said, I hope it's temporary.





We caught Josh outside the church a couple Sundays ago entertaining folks with his Ray Charles impersonation. He's such a cut-up.





But this little cut-up scared the crap out of us last week. As you may or may not remember,Josh operates on about a 12 month level. He can't talk but we're working on other forms of communication and he's coming along well.

So it's last Friday afternoon, Nijal has gone for the weekend on respite, Preston is at a friends house for the evening, Hana and Isaac are at their Aunt Sandy's house taking advantage of their cable TV while Sandy and her husband are out of town, and Ben has just left for a last late night with his buddies before he goes back to college. Sheila and Josh are hanging out at the house while I walked down to the video store to get us something to watch for the evening. I come back in the house and it's quiet as a graveyard. No sounds anywhere. This is highly unusual for my home, since this only occurs between about 3 AM when the last kid is in bed, and 4 AM, when I get up to go to work.

So I come through the door and I hear NOTHING! The van's still in the driveway so I know Sheila didn't go anywhere, and when I last left the house, Josh was wandering around clapping to whatever music it is that he hears, and hollering to beat the band.

I holler out, "HELLO!", and quickly get the response that I hope for; Sheila from the basement laundry room saying, "I'm down here!"

"Where's Josh?" I ask since I don't hear him anywhere.

"He's upstairs," she answers and so I head upstairs to check on him, and to make sure no one left the bathroom door open for him to get into something he shouldn't. I hear nothing as I climb the stairs and I'm getting nervous. I'm hoping he just fell asleep. So I go into the boys room, glancing over to make sure the bathroom door is closed, and...where is he? Is that him under the covers on the bottom bunk? Nope. Not their. I glance at the top bunks, there being four beds in the room, and see nothing but wadded up covers. (We haven't had a "made" bed in our since my mother last came to visit three years ago.) No Josh. He must have gone into our room. So it's out the door, down the hall and...nope, not on our bed either. Hana's got her hook and eye latch set on her door so I know he's not in there, but I check anyway. No Josh. Now I'm getting even more nervous. I go back through the boys room, checking behind the beds, pulling them away from the wall, checking in the closets, kicking at the piles of dirty clothes (hey, they're are some big piles in there), looking under the beds. No Josh. Into our room again, behind the bed, in the closet, under the headboard, wherever. No Josh. Hana's room. The bathroom. No Josh.

I holler down to Sheila, "He's not up here!"

"What?!"

"Josh is not upstairs!"

"Sure he is. He's got to be somewhere up there," she says as she climbs the stairs. "I've been in the dining room up until right before you walked in the door. He can't have gotten outside without me seeing him."

"I'm telling you. He's not up here." I call Hana. "Do you guys have Josh over there with you for some reason?" I ask.

She answers, "No, he's at home."

"No he's not at home. That's why I'm asking if he's there with you. If he was at home I would know it and I wouldn't be calling you asking if he was over there, now would I?!" It was then I noticed the panic was setting in. One last place to look. I walk out the door, going to Preston's friend down the street. Maybe for some reason they've got Josh with them. Although I seriously doubt it, but I've got to check, right?

As I go out the door I hear Sheila on the phone with the police "He can't talk!". She's nearly in tears, but I can't stop. Time is a'wasting. I get to the friends house, and you guessed it. No Josh. I head back to the house with the friends mom starting out around the block to look for Josh. In the meantime, Sheila has called Hana, Ben after she got off with the police. Hana has already taken off in the van to drive around looking. I grab the pick-up and take off through the park. Josh loves the park. Surely he's there, swinging on a swing, oblivious to the panic he has instigated. As I circle through the park I begin to wonder if he's still wearing the black shirt I saw him in earlier. Josh seems to change clothes alot and maybe Sheila put a different colored shirt on him while I was gone. Should I look for a black shirt or what? I try to call her to ask and get no answer. I circle the veteran's memorial and head back to the house to ask.

As I get to the corner I see a crowd in our yard. And there, on the top step of the porch, in Ben's arms, is the happy, grinning, clapping, hollering Josh that we love so much. The driveway is blocked by the police car, so I pull straight up into the yard, crushing a Nerf gun under my truck tire (we've got too many of them anyway). I jump out and the first thing out of my mouth is exactly what you would expect. "Is the pizza here yet?"

No, just kidding. Seriously, I really did ask where they found him. Apparently it went like this. Mom got a hold of Ben and told him to turn around and head back and look for Josh as they were coming. They didn't see him, so the first thing Ben did when he got back to the house, surely thinking that Mom and Dad are not nearly as smart as they think they are, was go upstairs to look in all the same places that we had already looked. I mean, do I LOOK like an idiot!

He walks into the boys room and hollers, "JOSH!" and BOOM! There on the loft bed that Isaac sleeps in, grinning his grin, is our man Josh. He just threw the covers back and sat up, looking at Ben as if to say Look how high I am up here, and no one can see me!. We don't know how he did it, since he has never done it before, but somehow he climbed up in Isaac's loft bed, pulled the covers over himself completely and nodded off.

Sheila and I had both looked up there and never saw even the slightest indication that under that wad of a comforter could be a little boy. But there he was. The officer was very nice and took all his information, just in case Josh ever took off for real, said goodbye, and left us to hug and kiss our little prodigal boy.

It was as we stood there on the porch, hugging, kissing and crying, that we got the greatest news of the evening. The pizza girl drove up in the driveway. DINNER'S HERE!!

So that's the story of the day Josh almost, kinda sorta, but not quite ran away. Maybe next week I'll tell you about the pig I saw with a wooden leg.