One afternoon last spring I heard Daisy barking so I peeked out the window to see what she was excited about. A white station wagon was slowly crawling up the driveway with a neatly dressed couple inside. Only Jehovah Witnesses dress in their Sunday best on a weekday and come calling at your house uninvited. I had just made up my mind to pretend not to be home when I saw the car come to a halt. Daisy was standing in the middle of the driveway barking her head off and wouldn’t move. The car sat there undecidedly for a few minutes before slowly backing up and turning around. Daisy was triumphant and I was relieved.
Our victory was short-lived however. A few days later I heard Daisy barking again and this time a large flatbed truck was trundling up the drive. The JW’s were back, and this time they’d sent the ranch division. These guys weren’t nervous about barking farm dogs. The truck pulled up to the house and a big man with a cowboy hat stepped out of the driver’s seat while a smaller man in a suit and tie with a Bible under his arm stepped out of the other. They had already seen me before they got to the house so it was no use hiding.
I went out to greet the two men on the porch and they started giving me their spiel. I wasn’t really listening because I was watching the scene unfold behind their backs. A strange truck in the driveway had not gone unnoticed by my five goats who had been grazing in the field moments before. They all came up to inspect the unfamiliar vehicle and add a few nose prints and hoof marks. And when Mr. Cowboy asked me if I believed in Jesus, my response was, “Did you know there’s a goat in your truck?”
The guy whipped around to see Pac-Man crawling around in the cab of his truck with Nubbin right behind him. He had left the driver door standing open and naturally it was the first thing the goats discovered. At first he acted like he didn’t care. “Oh, it’s a farm truck, they can’t hurt it.”
“Maybe not,” I replied, “but are you sure you don’t need the upholstery, because it’ll be gone in five minutes. And you might not care to sit in whatever Pac-Man is leaving there on the seat.”
With that statement, he bolted off the porch and with a little handy maneuvering he managed to get the goats out of the vehicle before any damage was done. He closed the door and tried to come back to the subject of my salvation, but the moment was lost and it wasn’t long before the two fellows bowed out with as much dignity as they could still muster. They could tell I was having a hard time keeping a straight face. No one comes to our place and leaves a car door open. No one.