Somethings Wrong …..

   ” Somethings wrong  Rich !! …… somethings wrong !! “
 The tone of my wifes voice had me quickly up off the chair with that ball in the pit of my stomach. There was no doubt something was indeed wrong from the first word and it was only reinforced by her repeated and anxious call to …. 
   “Hurry something is wrong !”     She was referring to a nearby neighbor, a single mother, who was frantically calling out the name of her child as she paraded up and down the street.
  ” He’s gone…Oh my God he’s gone!  I can’t find him…Please…I can’t find him!”
 She screamed his name  again and again and with that horrible gnawing feeling we began searching the neighboring yards while the police were on the way.
  ” Rich go look across the  street…they have a pool!”  and the wifes inferance instantly brought back ugly moments long ago when I pulled a child , unconcious and black lipped, from a swimming pool. I’m ashamed to say I stood there wasting a long precious moment before rushing across the street in order to find the pool  thankfully empty .
  Numerous police on and off duty arrived by patrol car and bicycles as a helicopter arrived to hover back and forth across the neighborhood in search of a missing child. The situation became more intense with each passing minute, the searching more frantic and the mothers calls more anguished until we finally learned the outcome.
  I later thought of the resources involved in this mammoth effort to reunite a mother and child and came to conclude that nothing could be worth the price or effort more. How  we take for granted this place that has the wealth to afford police and helicopters sent into  action on the spur of the moment to aide but only one of us in need. There are those that would diminish those resources with the arguement of the necessity of austerity…but it wouldn’t be me.
  Turns out the kid was in school…just like he is every week day.  And so it would seem the cause of all this was nothing more than a mother’s confused awakening from an alcohol or pill induced slumber  to the belief that it was the weekend. She was taken away in an ambulance and I’ll likely never ask her why….. but we’ve seen it many times…and I know why.  And my wife was right……
     Something’s wrong …….