Last week, I mentioned that I had gone to dinner with my friend Hite and he had told me a story that left me with tears running down my cheeks and gasping for breath. I said I’d tell y’all about it as soon as he sent me some pictures to illustrate.

I am going to preface this story by telling y’all that there is absolutely no way that the written word can do this justice, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

My friend Jen lives just a few blocks away from Hite. We have all been friends since college and Jen and Hite hang out on an almost daily basis. Jen wasn’t available for dinner the other night because she is attending seminary, works almost full time, teaches 184 classes at her church, runs marathons and in her spare time goes on mission trips to Africa. She is what y’all might call a Type A personality. In fact, while we were roommates in college she would purposely wake me up at 8:00 a.m. because she felt I’d had enough sleep and needed to help her conquer the world. Amazingly enough, we are still friends.

Anyway, Jen has a lot of personality and never does anything halfway. You never have to wonder how she’s feeling about something because she will let you know, usually in a voice that isn’t necessarily an inside voice. In fact, she and Gulley have both been known to talk so loud that it has been suggested that they might have hearing problems.

Okay, so the week of Thanksgiving, Hite’s phone rings about 10:45 at night. It’s Jen and she is talking so fast and is so upset that he can’t even understand what she is saying. She tells him to get to her house right now. So, he jumps in the car and speeds over to her house fearing that something really bad has happened because she is so wound up.

He walks in the door and she is hysterical. He finally gets her to calm down long enough to find out that she walked out in the backyard about an hour before and saw some men in a truck stopped behind her house and when they saw her, they sped away. Then, about thirty minutes later she starts hearing some horrendous, loud noise coming from her backyard. She runs out to see what is going on and immediately notices the terrible smell.

In the meantime, her dog Willie has also run out to the backyard and is barking and going wild. She can’t get him to come into the house. Willie is no average dog. He already functions at a higher level of excitement than your normal canine. In fact, he has been known to get so excited that he has jumped through her plate glass window not once, but twice. Of course in the midst of all this chaos, he is beyond wound up.

Hite listens and hears all the commotion coming from the backyard. They go outside and he says the smell is just beyond awful and the noise is worse. He manages to get Willie back in the house and then goes to inspect the source of the noise. This is what he finds.

They are under Jen’s deck with slop and all. Hence, the smell…and the noise.

Just as they are trying to figure out the best course of action for renegade domestic pigs, six cop cars, a firetruck and an ambulance show up with sirens blazing in front of Jen’s house. It seems that before she called Hite, she called 911.

The police get out of the car with their electric tasers drawn and ready for action because as it turns out, Jen was so hysterical during her call to 911 that the operator taking the call coded her as crazy. Seriously.

I guess they figured anyone who lives in the heart of a major city who calls and hysterically suggests that some unknown perpertrators have placed something that appears to be livestock in their backyard has a high probability of being a little off.

Hite said the cops kept walking around saying “Bob, I’ve been on the force 18 years and never seen anything like this”. And then, “Carl, you ever seen pigs in someone’s backyard in this part of town?” They were stunned and weren’t sure about the next course of action.

They did volunteer that it was obviously either just a practical joke or someone had decided they no longer wanted those pigs, which they all agreed didn’t seem likely because why would someone drive to the middle of a city to drop off pigs in an upper middle class neighborhood.

How about those powers of deductive reasoning?

Jen said, “No one I know would do something like this”, but it seems that she was wrong. Apparently for some reason that I have forgotten, two of her friends from church had these pigs in their possession and had spent the week dropping them off in various church members’ backyards as a practical joke.

The next morning when they called to laugh and claim their pigs, the joke was on them because those pigs had been hauled off by animal control.

I’m not sure of their fate, but that night as Hite was telling me the story he had ordered the pulled pork and as he went to take a bite he said, “I hope this isn’t them”.

The end.

Over the last 24 hours we have been busy around here making the yuletide gay. And by gay, I don’t mean that we’ve been listening to Cher. Although we have listened to a little Judy Garland. I mean that we have been festive and full of Christmas cheer.

Not that there is anything wrong with listening to Cher.

Yesterday afternoon, I decided that we needed to decorate some sugar cookies and since this was a spur of the moment decision based mainly on the fact that it was freezing cold and sleeting outside and we desperately needed an activity NOW, I didn’t have time to wait for homemade dough to chill so I reached for my good friend the dough boy and his slice and bake offerings.

I have never seen Caroline as excited as when faced with such a variety of items to make a huge mess with. Oh! the flour! the sparkles! the red hots! the dough! It was an embarrassment of riches.

She focused all of her decorating efforts on one lone, candy cane shaped cookie and having emptied the entire container of colored sugars decided she was done. I’d like to say it was totally worth the huge amount of cleanup involved, but I think that might be a lie.

Then, this morning we had Breakfast with Santa Claus and I made a huge error in judgement by creating a buzz about it last night, so this morning she was up at 5:30 yelling “Mama, let’s go see Santa. Let’s go eat with Santa!”. By the time Gulley and her gang finally arrived to pick us up at 8:30, we were more than ready to go.

During the course of the morning I can guarantee that I made her aware of the fact that Santa was watching at least 154 times which would buy me maybe 30 seconds of quiet obedience. Maybe 30 seconds.

Gulley and I have a term we use to describe docile, gentle children. We call them “cup-pourers”. The name is derived from the little kids who sit on the edge of the baby pool in the summer time and are perfectly content to just fill their little nesting cups with water and then dump them out and then fill their cups and dump them out, while their mamas get to visit and drink a beer and have enjoyable adult conversation.

Gulley and I have not given birth to “cup-pourers”. This fact is confirmed every summer at the pool as we chase our kids as they run from one end of the pool to the other and it was confirmed again this morning as we chased them all over the country club while waiting for Santa and breakfast. At one point I even looked and thought why is that rope line holder about to fall over and realized it was because all three of our kids were trying to swing on it. And so here we go again with “Santa is right there watching you”.

We’d like to complain, but seeing as how neither of us could be classified as a “cup-pourer”, it would stand to reason that neither would our precious offspring.

So after a morning of sitting on Santa’s lap, eating some French Toast sticks drowned in maple syrup, and my futile attempts to get a decent picture of the three of them in front of the Christmas tree we headed home.

Gulley had fit all three carseats in her backseat, so on the way there we had talked about how great it would be to take all the kids to Bryan together. Then, on the way home listening to Caroline and Jackson argue throughout the entire 20 minute drive about who was strong enough to pull a helicopter out of the sky, we decided that maybe that trip could wait another year or five.

All in all it’s been a very merry 24 hours and the best part is that right now Caroline is in her room sleeping in heavenly peace. I’m about to do the same. And although all this merry making has worn me out, there is nothing better than spending time with best friends.

Gulley was in Bryan last week visiting Nena, so y’all know I was hoping that there would be some kind of story.

When they got to Nena’s house, Nena was wearing some light green velour pants paired with a sweater and a wide leather belt. Gulley said, “Well, Nena…look at you!”

And Nena said, “Well, I know. I’m a vision of loveliness.”

Later on, Uncle Glen came over and was complaining about how much he hates Walmart but “Mama wears me down and makes me take her to the Walmart”. He said the other day they were there for almost two hours, so to pass the time he started trying on sunglasses. Nena walked up and said “Quit trying on those sunglasses. People are going to think you’re not right in the head.”

And in all fairness to Uncle Glen, isn’t two hours in Walmart is enough to drive anyone a little bit out of their mind?

This past weekend, Gulley went to her cousin Matt’s wedding. Matt is the only son of Gulley’s Uncle Glen.

Uncle Glen is one of the more colorful characters you will ever meet. He lives in a solar powered cabin that he built in the middle of nowhere and wears a belt with the name Russell on it because his Mama bought it for him at a garage sale. It is not inconceivable to think that the federal government may not know that Glen exists. Nena says he’s so odd because she cried so hard when she found out she was pregnant with him.

He really is one of the sweetest people ever. In college, he would always say “Boy, if I were younger I would marry one of you gals for sure.” We all loved him.

More recently, he has been dating a woman who apparently has some concerns about where he stands with God. In fact, Nena told us that Glen’s girlfriend called her and wanted them to all get together and watch (in Nena’s words) “a RELIGIOUS film” about the evils of drinking beer.

Anyway this weekend, the whole family was gathered together to attend the big wedding. Gulley said the photographer called the whole clan together outside the church to take a family picture. She said they were all standing together for the photo; cousins, aunts, uncles and Nena and Grandaddy.

The photographer snapped a few pictures and then Nena said, “Now get one of just me because I love this dress and I’ve never looked better.”

And that’s the memory that will really be the most important one of the day.

Since I just wrote about singing the wrong lyrics to songs, I have to share this with y’all.

There is a song I love right now called Strong Tower by Kutless. I put it on a CD and gave it to Gulley because I knew she would like it. She told me the other day that they listen to it in the car all the time and her little boy absolutely loves it.

The chorus goes, “You are my strong tower, shelter when I’m weak…”

The other day, Gulley was out walking with her husband and their two boys. Her little boy starts singing with great enthusiasm, “You are my strong tower, sausage when I’m weak…”

Her husband pointed out that their son’s version does make sense, because nothing will give you a little bit of energy like some protein in the form of a processed breakfast meat product.