As I sit in my den writing this blog post, Dash runs across the room, triggering the siren again: Woo woo woo woo, louder then softer, fading back into the oblivion from which it loudly emerged just seconds ago. This police car siren, it has been emitting sounds randomly for about a week now, and I have yet to locate its source.
First I searched the pile in the corner of the den -- the pile that should be small and contained in a nice gingham-lined Pottery Barn basket but, instead, flows out of a copy box that has seen better days. The siren sounds like it's coming from that corner, but I just. can't. find. it.
I checked the office nook just outside my bedroom, the nook that I just cleaned and organized into coordinated bamboo Ikea containers. Nope, there are no sirens there...
It has to be somewhere here. Perhaps the noise is coming from a toy I don't recognize -- entirely possible, as Dash just had a birthday and received all sorts of exciting noisemakers -- ? Or perhaps it's in the basement bedroom beneath?
Or perhaps the sirens are real; we are a mile from EPA, after all...? (I jest. I heart EPA, especially the best Starbucks in America near the Ikea, where they once locked my purse in the safe after I left it on back of my chair.)
Today is the day on which I will dig through the toys and find the police car and remove its batteries. Today is the day that this noise that has nagged and eluded me -- only when someone rattles it the right way, though -- will be silenced. But I wonder, is that the right thing to do?
I've thought about leaving the mystery police car siren hidden and active. When it goes off, I can tell visitors one of the following:
- We're trying to get the kids used to living in an unsafe area; the economy is bad, after all.
- We want the kids to behave and have found the siren a useful reminder of that expectation.
- It's left over from the Bush administration.
- Don't you just feel safer with a police presence?
- The stimulus plan provides gun-ready police protection to those making over $250g here in Silicon Valley since there is no room to shovel anything anymore. Thank God for Democrats!
Okay, I'll find the toy. It can't be that hard, what with only a hundred thousand or so in the house...
*Lyric from "Sound of Da Police" by KRS One
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