Sunday, SUNDAY, Sunday!

Yesterday marked one solid week of my husband's failed attempts to contact our beloved, aged, terminally ill friend, Robert. He did not answer the phone, make his doctor's appointments, or come to the door when Ben pounded on it for 7 days. Feeling distressed, with images of Robert fallen down, bruised and bleeding, passed out, or deceased inside his trailer, Ben called the sheriff. He went through the details of why we were so antsy, and the sheriff's office agreed to check things out and call Ben back...but no call came. Around 10pm, I encouraged Ben to call the sheriff's office back. They told him in not-so-nice terms that they were not sending out a deputy, as they had done so many other times and Robert, who is pretty much a gun-toting nut, had threatened them.

We paced around the house for a few minutes, and decided to drop by the sheriff's office and talk in person. The deputy who we met was much more pleasant face to face. We talked for probably 20 minutes and persuaded him (since he wouldn't give us permission to break into Robert's house) to send a couple of other deputies out with us to check things out. We had to wait to meet the deputies in the AEP parking lot off of Rt. 682, by the railroad tracks so they could follow us out to his house.

That's where I had one of the weirdest, is-this-for-real style moments of my life.

While we were waiting at midnight in the Electric company's parking lot for the sheriff's deputies to take us out to our friend's house to make sure he wasn't dead, I watched a train approach the crossing right next to us at full speed. At first, I didn't think the crossing bars and lights were going to activate, but then they did, right at the last second. The conductor was caught off guard, I think, and "slammed on the breaks" of the train right in front of the intersection. Right at that second, an ambulance pulled up, lights flashing, to the far side of the crossing and had to wait for the train to go by. At the same time, some guy on a bicycle, smoking a cigarette, pedaled up to the crossing right in front of us. He pulled up beside this crappy white car and started giving the passenger directions somewhere. All this while a train is screeching, trying to slow down. And then, as quickly as it formed, the scene dissolved.

The deputies arrived a few minutes later and followed us to our friend's house. A TV was on in his trailer that hadn't been on earlier, and they had Ben pound and pound on the door. I pounded on the side of building, too. Eventually, we hear rustling near the room with the TV glow. Robert managed to hobble, shirtless and disoriented, to the front door. I thanked the deputies and sent them on their way. Ben talked with Robert and discovered that his phone was broken. We're pretty sure that Robert was unconscious for a lot of the past week, but he's the kind of stubborn SOB who doesn't accept things like ambulance rides, so we promised to help him sort out his phone problem and went home to bed.