Sunday Surprise

Sharon and I were having lunch in our backyard this Easter Sunday afternoon when a squirrel urinated on me.

No, I am not making this up.

There we were, sitting in the shade underneath our Japanese maple tree when I suddenly felt water hitting me on my right arm and head.

For a brief moment, I wondered — had a sprinkler suddenly gone crazy and started spraying me?

Then I looked up — and I kid you not, a squirrel on the branch above was looking down at me.

That’s when I knew what had happened.

Then the critter scampered from the branch to our roof — never taking his/her gaze off me for a second.

He or she seemed highly pleased. And relieved.

Trust me — something like that had never happened to me. And I’ve lived a good many years.

And it spurred quite a conversation, and plenty of reminiscences, about where we’d been and what we’d done on other Easter Sundays — or Sundays in general — during our lives.

We remembered a few of those Sundays.  Our first Easter Sunday together was back in 1975. We were three months away from getting married.

We spent that Sunday afternoon after church at Sharon’s parents’ ranch in Clovis.

We even have a photo from that occasion (right), with her mom and dad and grandma.

We were So Darn Young.

We spent many Sundays in the years that followed playing golf in the various cities where we lived.

Golf on Sundays.  That was the deal for us.

After Fresno, jobs took us to Ames, Iowa; Phoenix; Detroit; Buffalo; Atlanta; San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The most memorable Sunday round came when we were on a course in Buffalo.  We were on the back nine, and you can imagine our surprise to see the clubhouse pro coming toward us in a golf cart.

He said someone from my TV station — WKBW — was calling and needed to talk to me. Urgently.

Whoo, boy.  Thinking the worst (and with no cellphone), I got into the cart and rode to the clubhouse to call the station.

That’s when the 6 p.m. news producer told me she had called to find out what I thought she should lead with that evening.

Yes, yes.  That’s what she wanted to know. And she knew where to reach me because — well, because everyone knew we played golf on Sundays.

I gave her some advice — and then told her that she was the producer and could, in the future, make that decision. She did.

When Brad and Amy came along, our golfing days diminished, temporarily.  We needed to be home on weekends — except for Sunday mornings, when we often took them to church.

The Easter Sunday that stands out in both our minds is the one we spent with the kids in London.

We had told Brad and Amy — right up to the moment we left home — that we were going camping in Yosemite.

Only when pulled out of our driveway did we reveal we were going, instead, to London.

We had taken them there for the first time two years earlier.  But it had been winter — Christmastime — when we went.

And that meant it was bitterly cold, and we all had to bundle up. Uncomfortable.

Besides, Amy was only 2 and did not remember anything about that trip.

This time, she was 5, and Brad was 9, and it was April.

The weather was magnificent on that Easter Sunday in London in 1994 — sunny and warm.  And the tulips were showing off their spectacular colors.

That Sunday afternoon, we went to Westminster Abbey, where so many English heads of state are buried and so much history has taken place over the past 1,000 years.

Unforgettable.

When we moved back to Fresno after years away, Sharon and I also returned to weekend golfing, often with friends Bill and Polly (left) or Albert and Jeannie.

Sharon’s parents would entertain Brad and Amy at the ranch while we made our way around the courses.  The kids loved it on that ranch.

It was a great time in all our lives.

And then, and then.

Brad graduated from Fresno State and went off to school in Scotland.  Amy graduated from high school that same year and went off to Cal Poly.

And Sharon and I had pretty much stopped golfing by then. Her back had started giving her too many problems, and without her, I really did not want to play.

So we spent many summer weekends watching golf on TV.

To make this long story shorter (you’re welcome), we moved around a bit in retirement — to the Central Coast, then to Madera County, and now back to Fresno.

Which brings us all the way back to this past Sunday afternoon.  After church, there we were, in our backyard, minding our own business and enjoying lunch underneath that Japanese maple.

After eating, we were planning to watch golf on TV.

And then came the aerial liquid bombardment. It was, in its way, quite impressive.

And I have to give that squirrel credit.  He (or she) made this truly an Easter Sunday to remember.