When Earl was a baby, there was lots of shuffling back and forth between our home in the Carolinas and our families in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. TechPapa did heaps of traveling with work in there, too, so there were times when, for whatever reason, my mother, Earl, and I would drive one vehicle to one destination, meet TechPapa at some mid-point and do a car swap – his car for mine, mine for my mother’s, his for my mother’s, whatever.
On one fateful trip, TechPapa was working a football game in Knoxville, which meant we’d all met up in the Tennessee mountains then figure out where we were all headed and swap cars if needed. This particular time, it was decided that my mom and I would take Earl with us to Alabama to visit my grandmother in the van which TechPapa had driven over while he would take my mother’s car to Atlanta to visit a client.
Now this particular client isn’t a typical, everyday client. This particular client has full vehicle searches and bomb screenings and pat-downs. In other words, my husband took my mother’s car to the CDC. Which was great. All good, right?
Until the federal cop dude at the CDC asked my husband those fateful six little words: “Do you have anything to declare?” My husband, wonderfully blissful in my mother’s pimp-white Chrysler 300 stands confidently and says, “No, sir!”
At which time a second federal cop dude, who had been searching the car, appears from his search of the driver’s seat compartment and holds his bounty by it’s wooden handle above the roof of the car: “Then would you care to explain this?”
My husband gives the agent a look I can only imagine and, realizing the gravity of his possible situation – I mean, in their eyes he’s essentially smuggling a deadly weapon onto federal property – quickly spouts the first thing that comes to his mind.
“It’s my mother-in-law’s!”
You can imagine the chuckle that gave the guys at the gate. After a thorough search and checking the registration to insure that this is, in fact, not his vehicle but possibly one belonging to a maybe mother-in-law, they let him through, giving him a receipt to retrieve the item on his way back out through the gate.
My husband calls me in a hushed panic. “Tell your mother she nearly landed me in federal prison today! An AXE?? REALLY???”
“Um…oops?” was the best I could do before I nearly keeled over laughing. “We forgot! I swear! It’s been there forever and we don’t even think about it anymore.”
“Your mother ALWAYS carries an AXE in her car?? Should I be worried about this??” His whispered voice had jumped a couple of octaves.
“It’s not an AXE! It’s a HATCHET! She used to travel the river road all the time, and it’s there in case she has to cut down a tree or break out a window or something. I swear, that’s it!”
“A head’s up would have been nice.”
“But you’re not in jail, I assume. Since, you know, you’re calling me from your cell phone?”
“No! But I’m pretty sure I’m the laugh of the CDC today.”
Which was just about right. As he left, he pulled back up to the gate and before he could even hand the claim check to the agent, the agent grinned. “Mother-in-law’s axe, right?”
Funny. That was the last time we played car roulette when he was going anywhere but home.
And today, when he had to drive back to ATL to visit the CDC, I had the passing impulse (which I squashed, thank you) to plant the hatchet back under the seat of his pickup. You know, just to see if the boys at the gate remembered him.
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