Saved By the Bell - Or, a Knock In Time Saves Eight

Possibly divine phone call preempts domiciliary roadkill scenario:

    Mary Dhume was watching television Monday night when the phone in the next room rang. She got up to answer it, but there was no one at the other end of the line.

    Suddenly, she heard breaking glass and saw her living room wall collapse onto the chair where she'd been sitting.

    A pickup truck had missed the curve on the road in front of Dhume's home and smashed into the century-old house. Dhume said she saw the driver run away as she dialed 911.

    ...."The phone ringing at that particular time? That's one of those things people would never believe," Dhume said. "Maybe it was God calling to tell me to get out of my living room." [AP]

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

When we were in high school, a good friend of mine lived right in downtown Chagrin Falls. One night he and his family of (I believe) eight were enjoying a little televised entertainment when they heard a knock at the back door. This was unusual because the entire family was present in the TV room (this was the '70s when families still did such things) and the back yard was fenced. Who could it be?

They went to investigate en masse because it was an Anson Williams-directed episode of Happy Days airing that night.

The father opened the door with some slight intrepidation, but no one was there. They all fanned out into the back yard and poked about but the source of the knock remained a mystery.

Just as they began filing back into the house, a drunken Porsche doing 65 in a 25 zone veered left to avoid a cat, jumped the curb, struck the huge decorative boulder in their front yard flower garden, careened upward and ripped through the wall at eye level into the formerly peaceful and tidy TV room, with accompanying apocalyptic destruction, dust and din. Richie and Fonzi never knew what hit them.

The drunken fuckbubble assbreath driver was nonplussed but virtually unharmed as he found himself abruptly parked and indoors. The family was stunned but untouched as their knees collectively buckled in recognition of the carnage they had so narrowly escaped by the grace of a phantom knock on the back door.

Why does this stuff always happen in Ohio?

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Article Author: Eric Olsen

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and former publisher of Blogcritics.org, and former publisher of Technorati.com, which both rule. He is now editor, co-founder, and CEO of The Morton Report.

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Article comments

  • 1 - Joe

    Aug 26, 2004 at 4:53 pm

    Man, that totally blew my mind!

    They actually let Anson Williams direct?!! I mean Donny Most, sure, but Warren Webber?

  • 2 - Eric Olsen

    Aug 26, 2004 at 5:09 pm

    these are the facts, strange though they may seem

  • 3 - Eric Olsen

    Aug 27, 2004 at 12:15 pm

    my friend read this and corrected me: it WASN'T an Anson Williams-directed episode of Happy Days that fateful night - my mistake

  • 4 - Joe

    Aug 27, 2004 at 12:27 pm

    You can understand my shock and awe, then.

  • 5 - Eric Olsen

    Aug 27, 2004 at 12:28 pm

    not to mention the phantom knock part, which the entire family swears to, to this very day

  • 6 - Eric Olsen

    Aug 27, 2004 at 3:13 pm

    this post rules - whoever wrote it is steeped in Conradian brilliance

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