We brought Elizabeth home from the hospital this afternoon with one sprained and one broken ankle. It was a team effort: Brother-in-law Rick, sister-in-law Evie, #2 son Thomas, cheering by sister Sally and niece Becky. Thank the Lord.

I was about to work out when she called. She’d fallen on Dodson Way. Oh, crap. Was it the knee she shattered a year ago? Nope. Ankle(s).

When I arrived, some nice Dodson Way people were minding the dogs and comforting Elizabeth until the ambulance and the fire truck, whose sirens we could hear from WAY off, arrived.

They said you could hear the final artillery barrage on July 3 at Gettysburg in Harrisburg,, Philadelphia and Baltimore. The sirens reminded me of that.

Four cute young men took care of her.

The ambulance guys were very solicitous. I asked one if Frank Kelton still owned the ambulance company. We were altar boys together at St. Barnabas. Nope, the ambulance guys replied. Frank’s retired, but his son is the boss now.

$3500 for the ambulance? one cute young man asked. Or, your husband could drive you to the ER.

We chose the latter.

So I pull up to the AG Community Hospital with one wife in pain, one Irish Setter and one Basset Hound. I dash inside.

Dash, dash dash.

They point me to a wheelchair.

Wheel, wheel, wheel.

STAY, doggies!

I take Brigid and Walter home. Then I change out of my stinky gym gear into a nice shirt and shorts. I hear the front screen door click.

Sprint, sprint, sprint.

Brigid is in the front yard, doing puzzled orbits. She looks like she’s about to take off. Maybe, she’s thinking, there are ducks nearby for me to find?

NO! I shout. She stops. IN THE HOUSE! She obeys.

Wait. Didn’t we have TWO dogs? Confirmed. So this is what I do next:

WALTER!

Walter?

Walter Walter Walter Walllll-ter?

Repeat 17 times.

He’s not in front. He’s not in back. He’s not at his girlfriend Millie’s at the end of the block.

WALTER? Okay, I’m almost sobbing.

Meanwhile, my wife is in the ER. Without me.

I walk again to the end of the block. Then to the other end. Then I get in the car and circumnavigate Fair Oaks two and a half times.

I come home, defeated and disconsolate. Then I knock on Jim, our next-door neighbor’s door. Walter was there all along.

Basset hounds are notoriously stubborn. And selectively deaf.

But to give you an idea of what Basset hounds mean to me, I smoked a pack of cigarettes in the two days after Wilson, our first Basset, died. I hadn’t smoked in forty years. That’s Wilson, at left, and Walter, puppyish, on the right.

But I had to slap on after-shave and squeegee on deodorant. Back to the hospital.

The receptionist suggests politely: “Your wife’s credit card isn’t going through. Would you like me to try it again?”

A few minutes later: “Would you like me try it again?”

I’m flop-sweating now, because I was going to go to SESLOC to get a new credit card for the one I think is lodged somewhere in the washing machine. We had no backup credit card, and, true, we have a debit card, but it was already $187 overdrawn.

“Would you like me to try it again?” She was so nice about it.

Fourth time. It worked. “The problem was on our end,” she admitted. I was so nice about it.

When we got home, we found out that the card had, indeed, been charged four times.

I thought about telling them that Dr. Cookson, who founded the hospital, was my doctor when I was little, but the Frank Kelton story didn’t go over all that well, so I held my tongue.

As I did when they kept calling out a woman named Maria in the waiting room. I had to put my hands around my own neck to keep from belting out “Maria” from “West Side Story.”

Getting home was as painful for Elizabeth on crutches and a borrowed wheeliemajig . Thank goodness, Thomas had made dinner. It just took awhile to get Elizabeth inside so she could enjoy it.

We got her situated in the same bed where she’d lived for so many weeks last summer with the shattered kneecap.

Winston the Cat, Wilson the Basset and Brigid the Irish Setter all squeezed in close to Mom.

Brigid has occasional seizures and the medication prescribed her sometimes makes her forget what her hind end is doing.

Yup. She forgot.

To give you an idea of how wet the bed was, I will have to refer you to Pharoah’s army getting drownded in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 “The Ten Commandments,” which the four-year-old me saw at the Fair Oaks. The struggling horsies [SEE: Jim Morrison, the Doors, the song “Horse Latitudes,” which includes the line “Mute nostril agony”] forever traumatized me, although not quite as much as Bambi’s mother.

That much pee.

So I/we changed the sheets.

Change, change, change.

Do you feel a wet spot?

Yes.

Do you feel a wet spot?

Yes.

I think we have it all.

Wait. She got this pillow, too.

* * *

Just another day at La Casa de Gregory.