Donna Fielder

She sat in the jail lobby waiting for a magistrate to set bail for her daughter. I hadn’t seen her in a long time, but I recognized the pained expression of an unhappy parent.

“She celebrated her 21st birthday yesterday,” my old friend said glumly. “She celebrated too well, I guess.”

The daughter had been nabbed doing at least one of the things people tend to do on their 21st birthdays.

“She called me at 5 a.m. to come and get her. I told her no way was I coming down here at that time of day,” she said. “She called me again this afternoon and begged me to come. She said she was looking at four walls. I told her to look really hard because that was what she’d be seeing a lot of if she did something like this again.”

I wished her luck and walked out of the lobby, thinking of the times I’d sat there myself. It was never funny at the time, but now I can’t help laughing as I remember the brighty-tighties caper and the time my son told a passel of officers who knew me that his mom owned the Denton Record-Chronicle.

And then there was the bedspring incident with my daughter. Yes, I’ve had my share of those embarrassing moments when a parent gets sucker-punched with an offspring’s first glancing contact with the law. The first call came not long after the twins graduated high school. My son sounded contrite over the phone, and I could hear laughter in the background.

“Mom, uh, could you come and get me out of jail?” he asked. “And, uh, could you bring me a pair of pants?”

I almost didn’t go, but my curiosity overcame my trepidation. It was one of those stories: “Well, we were hanging out at the park and this guy had a motorcycle. And he dared me to ride it in my underwear, and I had on these red jockey shorts and one thing led to another ... and then the police showed up,” he said.

“You were riding a motorcycle around Denton with nothing on but red underwear?” I gasped.

“Well no. I had on my cowboy boots,” he said.

After graduation my daughter moved into an apartment with a classmate. One morning her roommate called in a panic. “Mrs. Fielder, Christi’s stuck to the bed!”

“Put my daughter on the phone,” I said.

“Mom, it’s the bedspring,” she wailed. “I was at a bachelorette party, and I brought home all these balloons and all this confetti and I was a little, uh, dizzy, and I just fell into bed and the balloons went to the ceiling and the confetti is all over everything. ...”

“Get to the bedspring part,” I said.

“Oh yeah. Well, when I woke up a bedspring was sticking in my backside and I can’t get it out. It hurts, Mom. How am I going to get off this mattress?”

I tried not to imagine the balloons on the ceiling and the confetti all around.

“What are you wearing?” I asked.

“Well, uh. ...”

“Never mind. Tell your roommate to call 911.”

Apparently, no call like this one had ever come into the Hurst-Euless-Bedford 911 station. A few cops showed up, and two ambulances, and a fire engine and a battalion chief. More arrived as the word spread. I hung onto the phone as they gave her laughing gas so they could cut the spring out of her behind.

“Some of these guys are pretty cute,” my nubile 19-year-old giggled.

I moaned, listening to the party with the balloons and the confetti and the laughing gas and all those firefighters gathered around my daughter’s bed. I took two extra-strength Excedrin while they took a couple of stitches in her derriere and gave her a tetanus shot. Apparently there is no law against getting stuck to a bed, because the police cleared out after that.

One day I walked into the police department to read crime reports and found several cops lined up behind the duty desk. They were stifling smiles. Oh no. What now? I looked at the jail log, and there was my son’s name, shining like a diamond in a goat’s behind. I set my jaw, nodded to the grinning officers and walked into CID.

I was studiously reading reports when one of the cops came in and looked at me.

“Uh, he wants to know if you are going to bail him out.”

“What did he do?” I wanted to know.

“Well, he was a passenger in a car we pulled over and he would have been just fine, but he wouldn’t keep quiet. He kept telling us we’d better leave his friend the driver alone. He said it would be bad for us because his mother owned the DRC.”

I smiled grimly at the cop.

“Let him rot in there,” I said.

DONNA FIELDER can be reached at 940-566-6885. Her e-mail address is dfielder@dentonrc.com.