Monday, August 14, 2006

P.I.

We ate dinner with my mom and dad tonight and drove out to see our new house. Dad loved it out there. I knew he would.

My dad was always doing crazy stuff when I was growing up. He couldn't sit still for more than five minutes, and he was always coming up with a plan to strike it rich. He taught school for years and was an assistant principal, then struck out on his own to do construction. And lots of other stuff. My dad has started his own promotion company (for a country music act that lasted one night), bought a yacht (he can't sail), made a plan to import and export cars between the U.S. and Canada, and thought up a thousand other different ways to make an extra buck or two.

When I was fourteen, he was a private investigator for a weekend. Here's how it went down:

Dad had a friend, Cecil, who was a private investigator in Anderson County. Cecil was always hot on the trail of a cheating spouse, but rarely had much luck catching them in the act. Dad walked into Cecil's office one day and, in the course of conversation, asked just how one went about getting his private eye license in the state of South Carolina. "You send twenty bucks and a copy of your driver's license to this address," Cecil replied. Seeing how incredibly simple it was, dad just couldn't resist. He immediately mailed the necessary money and information and in no time flat was a certified private eye.

That very night, dad and Cecil went on their first stake-out together. Their mission was to trail the wife of some guy who suspected the wife was cheating on him with the real estate agent she worked for. Dad and Cecil parked in the lot of a restaurant across the street from the real estate office. Time passed, and they began to talk about fishing. They were deep in a discussion about the pros and cons of using live bait when they suddenly looked up. The real estate agent's car was gone.

"We missed 'em," said Cecil, unnecessarily.

Fortunately, Cecil had a Plan B. He knew where the real estate agent lived, where the wife lived, where her sister lived, and several other places the couple might have gone. Dad and Cecil began driving around Anderson County. They drove from house to house, but somehow, the agent and his little cookie cutter continued to evade the mastermind tactics of Cecil. It was getting late, and dad was getting tired. Finally, at about 3:00 am, their luck running out, dad asked Cecil if they could call it a night. That Monday, he tendered his resignation with the Cecil Millwater Private Investigative Services. He couldn't really see a future in staying up until the wee hours of the morning, following adulterers.

A few months later, a couple of doctors gave Cecil and his new partner an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii to track their cheating wives on vacation with their boyfriends. Dad has always claimed that even Hawaii wouldn't have been worth it to stay up all night sitting in a car, but I think he was privately disappointed.

1 Comments:

Blogger Joanna Bolick said...

hahahahahaha!

10:23 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home