I was teaching a composition class when the learning disabled woman who assists the secretary for the English Department barged into my room to ask, "Is this room 325?"

"Yes," I said.

"Then you must be Mike Davis," she said.

"I am," I replied.

"They want me to tell you that your wife is doing fine in the hospital. There's no reason to panic."

"The hospital?" I asked.

"That's where they took her after the man hit her."

"What man?" I asked.

"They said to tell you she's fine."

I dismissed my class early and raced to my office to call my wife's mobile phone number. I got her voice-mail. Then I called her office at Temple University. I got her voice-mail again. Then I sprinted to my car, deciding that I would have to decide whether I was headed to Temple or back home by the time I exited the parking lot. Since home was very close to being on the way, I decided to stop by and see if any messages had been left for me. (Insert chuckle directed at thirty-year-old twit who can never remember the code for checking his messages remotely.)

As I drove down DeKalb Pike toward my house, I revisited the ridiculousness of the learning disabled woman's message. What man? What hospital? What was going on? It seemed like a cock and bull story to me. It was my birthday, after all--November 5th. Mrs. Sloucho had asked me to cancel my classes for the day so that we could do something special. I had explained curtly that thirty was maybe a little late in the game to be getting that excited about a birthday. "At least cancel your last class," she had said. I refused again. And I didn't really feel compelled to explain my position.

Had my wife suddenly become so childish that she would call my workplace with some crazy story to get me home early? During that drive to my house, I began to suspect that she had. Well, there was no help for it now. I had already dismissed my last class of the day. If there were people at the house with cake and ice cream, I would have to mask my irritation with my wife and suffer through the festivities.

I opened the back door of my house prepared to hear, "Surprise!" shouted at me. But the only sound was the ringing of the telephone. It was one of my wife's colleagues and closest friends calling to explain that Mrs. Sloucho had encountered a very large man in her office as he was going through her purse. She thought she had locked the door before stepping into the office next to her own, but presumably the lock had not caught. When she returned, she found a man well over six feet tall (and, by all accounts, weighing in at over 250 pounds) going through her purse. The man graduated from theft to violence when she said, "Hey! That's my purse" as she reached for what was hers.

He swatted her arm away, which should have been the end of it. But Mrs. Sloucho screamed for help and blocked the doorway, which was the only way out of the office. Considering that Mrs. Sloucho is under five feet tall with no martial arts training to speak of, that was a fairly ill-advised move on her part. The mugger clutched the purse with one hand and punched my wife across the hallway with the other. He then raced towards the stairway as Mrs. Sloucho's boss emerged from his office in hot pursuit. Mrs. Sloucho's boss is an all-around nice guy and his heart was in the right place, but he himself has since admitted that he had no idea what his "five and half feet of research scientist intellectual fury" would have been able to do to the mugger if he had caught him.

The Temple police arrived a few minutes later and scolded Mrs. Sloucho for having failed to lock her door. Then they took her to the Temple University Hospital and forced her to admit herself to the emergency room despite her repeated protests that she was fine. She wasn't fine, and she knew (though they didn't) that her scalp was bleeding into her hair. But she had just had her purse stolen, and she didn't care to be stuck with the $500 copay that our health insurance plan requires of us for visits to the emergency room. They said that Temple would not bill us for the hospital visit, but they were wrong. We received the bill not a week later and had to make an endless series of phone calls over the course of several months to have the charge reversed.

I caught up with her as she was checking out of the emergency room. The campus cop who had been assigned to her case told me to follow him in my car. I did so. He told me to park on the sidewalk in front of the campus police station. I did so. We went inside so that Mrs. Sloucho could fill out all sorts of paperwork as I made phone calls to credit card companies, etc. But then we had to drive to the main campus police station so that Mrs. Sloucho could look through books of photos. We drove to that main station from the satellite station in the company of two 'detectives' who were primarily interested in what Mrs. Sloucho had said about her health plan. How could she work for Temple without being insured by Temple?

She had to explain that she didn't technically work for Temple, that she was an independent contractor who did work at Temple only a few days a week. "Well you should work for Temple," they explained. "The benefits are great. They've got a lot of jobs opening up right now in the dormitories. They pay you to live right on campus. You can put everything you make into a retirement fund." It seemed rather odd to both of us that neither of the cops seemed to think there was anything amiss about proposing that a woman take up residence in the very place where she had, only ninety minutes earlier, experienced the first criminal assault of her life.

Of course there was a parking ticket on our car when we returned to it. "Don't worry about that," said one of the detectives, "we'll take care of it." But they didn't take care of it. Our detectives had something else to occupy their afternoon, so we were left in the company of the man in charge of dusting for fingerprints. We returned to Mrs. Sloucho's office so that he could steal her coffee mug.

Let me explain about the coffee mug: It's perfect. It's the kind with the flared base that holds four glorious cups of the elixir of the gods. The lid is watertight--no leaks even if you turn it over. And unlike other, similar mugs that we had owned in the past, the lid still fit the mug perfectly after being subjected to the dishwasher over and over again. We bought two of these mugs at a Travel Center of America on one of our cross-country drives. We haven't seen the same exact mugs since. I still have mine. I take it to work with me every day and sip coffee through my first three classes. The coffee stays perfectly warm so long as I slide the cover back over the lip hole.

But Mrs. Sloucho no longer has her coffee mug. It was taken as 'evidence' by the fingerprinter, who is probably very happy with it. We have called and called the campus cops in an effort to have the mug returned to us, but they seem to think that we are still in their debt because they finally agreed to quit sending us notices about the parking violation that the detective told me I wouldn't have to worry about.

I can't say one word about the kind of education people receive at Temple University, but they get that education despite campus security and despite a bureaucracy that requires infinite patience.

Go Owls!



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