You can never be too careful

My dear friend Toi (who needs to be flogged into getting back to work on her blog) wondered if the repairman who was here last week took off his clothes, which gives me an excuse to rerun this tale:

My dad and brothers were Outdoorsmen, and, well, yes, they liked to shoot furry and winged things for sport. And food. I grew up eating quail and dove and rabbit, and I didn’t know the difference between venison and beef, because our freezer was always full of deerburgers and deersteaks and deerchops, and whatever else the butcher could carve deer into and wrap up in freezer paper. I tell you this for a reason. No, seriously, and I will get to it in just a moment, after I tell you this Next Thing.

Mom could be a tough cookie most of the time, but there were a few things that she must have worried about some, because she would take pains to warn me about them. For example, workmen that came to the house. If you called for a serviceman from Sears, then he should be wearing a Sears uniform when he shows up, that probably goes without saying. And of course you have to watch him like a hawk every second to make sure he’s actually working, and not pulling any fast ones, like surreptitiously breaking something just to then fix it and charge you lots of money.

But the main thing you had to look out for was if he asked to use your bathroom. And if that happened, you must never, ever, under any circumstances, say yes to that. Because there is only one reason that a repairman wants to “use your bathroom,” and that is to gain a few moments of privacy to strip off all his clothes, after which he will fling open the door and expose himself to the poor housewife.

And so . . .

Dad and the brothers would head out to the “deer woods” for several days in autumn, leaving the wimmenfolk home alone. I remember that when Mom and I would arrive home, especially after dark, we had to do a methodical check of all the nooks and crannies of the house to make sure no Sears repairmen or other intruders had infiltrated the place in our absence.

Or as Mom often said, “We would look under the beds and in the closets to see if there was a man hiding there. But (big sigh) . . . there never was.”

That’s how I learned that the only thing more important than saving yourself from rape and/or murder was being funny.