For ten years of my life I sold life insurance. Two of those ten years were spent living with small children in a mobile home parked in my parent’s back yard. We lived in Bisbee Junction and I sold insurance all over Cochise County.

If you’ve read my Joanna Brady books or if you happen to be familiar with Arizona, you may know that Cochise County is a square–eighty miles tall and eighty miles wide. That meant that after an evening appointment in Willcox, for example, I had an almost two hour commute back home. An appointment in Douglas or Sierra Vista made for half an hour to forty minutes of driving after evening appointments. All of which meant, I often didn’t get home from “work” or get wound down to sleep until close to midnight.

My daughter is always comparing her mothering skills to mine. She always assumes that her efforts come up short. She’s wrong.

My kids were little then. After many of those late nights for me, the kids would be up early and ready to rumble in the mornings long before I was. Much as it pains me to admit this, I often let Captain Kangaroo keep them occupied from seven to eight o’clock in the morning so I could grab a few more minutes of shut-eye. (These were the old days, after all, when morning television wasn’t wall-to-wall bad news.)

One evening when I came home, Dolores, the babysitter reported that earlier in the day she had found the kids in their bedroom playing nurse and patient with my four-year-old daughter administering Flintstones vitamins to her younger brother, the patient.

I was both appalled and astonished. The “medicine chest” in our house was on the second shelf in the kitchen cabinets at a height I assumed to be far above my daughter’s reach. That was true, but only as long as she was ON THE FLOOR! Once she used the step-stool to get up onto the countertop, all bets were off.

After Dolores left, I remember standing in the middle of the kitchen, trying to figure out what to do. I still wanted to be able to sleep in the mornings, but I didn’t want the kids having unauthorized access to the pill shelf because there were other things there besides the children’s vitamins. After several long minutes, inspiration struck. I rummaged through the pots and pans and located a lightweight metal lid which I propped on the top shelf of the cabinet–inside and leaning against the cabinet door when it was closed.

It worked like a charm. The next morning, I was sound asleep when I was awakened by a racket as the lid clattered noisily out of the cabinet, landed in the sink, and then did a suitable imitation of a drum roll as it finally came to rest. I charged out of the bedroom shouting, “What do you think you’re doing?” The telltale step stool was still sitting in front of the kitchen counter but my daughter was nowhere near it. When I found her, she was huddled in the far corner of the living room muttering, “That never happened to me before in my whole life!”

It never happened to her again, either. Not ever. I left the pot lid braced inside the cabinet for months afterwards. It fell down and caught me unawares a few times, but my daughter was cured. She never got into the cabinet again.

Which brings us to this week. On Tuesday, Bill, Bella, and I motored over to Whidbey Island where Bonnie Abney and I did one final Second Watch Dog and Pony Show with both Bella and Crackerjack in attendance. It was a benefit to raise scholarship money for the local branch of the AAUW, and it was a full house. Close to two hundred ticket-buying fans packed the social hall of the Oak Harbor United Methodist Church.

Bonnie and I arrived early and started signing books at 5 PM sharp, half an hour before the doors were supposed to open. We signed for over an hour, did the program, and then signed more books. The event was supposed to be over by seven thirty. It wasn’t. We didn’t finish signing books until well after eight.

I knew that afterwards we were scheduled to go to dinner at the Captain Whidbey Inn and that two friends of Bill’s and mine had been invited to join us there. On the way, looking at the clock and realizing it was almost 8:30, I wondered if the restaurant would still be serving. When we pulled into the parking lot and there were only four cars there, total, I figured we were out of luck.

Inside, however, the hostess welcomed us warmly, took photos of all of us in front of a roaring fireplace, and then walked us into the dining room which was totally empty. In the far corner of the room a single table was set and waiting. Individual menus at each place welcomed “The Jance Party.”

It turns out the Captain Whidbey Inn dining room isn’t open on Tuesdays. They had opened it that night for us. Specifically.

Sitting in my robe in the family room, working on finishing Joanna sixteen, it’s hard for me to realize that outside these four walls I’m considered to be a “celebrity.”

The other night on Whidbey, though, that’s exactly how I felt when I learned that the restaurant had opened its doors just for us so we could enjoy a delicious but very private dinner.

As my daughter said all those years ago, that never happened to me before in my whole life!

And I’m glad it did.