A Promise of Loyalty

While I probably shouldn't have abandoned my wife, children and dog to the slowly growing flood in our basement the other night, especially since we couldn't locate our submersible pump . . . but I would like to say in my defense that I did finally figure out who had borrowed it, though this was not until after I played in the first basketball game of the evening and -- unfortunately for my marriage -- my wife had already loaded the kids into the car (in their pajamas) and drove through the storm to the Home Depot, where she was going to purchase a new pump, when I called her . . . and she got home in time to get the pump into the basement shower so the water never went over the lip, and I got her flowers the next day, and it's not like this was a real flood, such as the one that caused a landslide to bury a village in Afghanistan, and I would like to hereby swear that if there ever is a real flood of that magnitude, I will skip Wednesday basketball night and remain with my family.