I love delivery day! But my delivery man does not!
I'm making delivery rounds this morning. I'm up before the kids, putting perfume and lipstick and foundation into crisp white paper bags printed with the red AVON logo. They look like lunch bags for surgeons, so proper, white, with the tops folded over in an even line.
My Avon delivery man is a skinny goateed fellow in his late twenties. He arrives like clockwork at 6:10 p.m. every other Wednesday in a slightly dingy nameless truck with a roll-up back door. He doesn't wear a uniform, only scruffy t-shirts and faded Old Navy jeans with a brown leather belt. I don't know his name.
Yesterday afternoon he loaded five boxes onto his dolly and swore as the wheels caught on my garden hose. The top box flew into a lavender bush. I ran from the front window out the door to help, but unfortunately, so did my two young children, the cat, and the dog.
Suzy is a great family dog. She's a medium sized mixed breed I rescued four years ago, part labrador, part wolf-hound, with long silky white hair (which you can admire on all of my furniture and clothes), and the most gentle demeanor - except when she suspects I'm in mortal danger.
I guess running to the door is mortal danger in dog language because Suzy barked like a pit bull and lunged, head low to the ground and hair hackled straight up in the air, for Delivery Man's thigh.
Have you ever had a moment when time stood still and everything is so much clearer and sharper than regular real life that you can see the micromovements and color and wind? I felt suspended in a Star Trek timeloop, one foot still inside on the threshold, one outside on the patio, unable to move, unable to speak, as the event unfolded.
My nine-year old dove, arms extended, for Suzy, managing to push my seven-year old into the path of the cat and Avon boxes. 9 grabbed the dog's neck the split second before thigh contact and they both tumbled in a heap on the painted cement. Meanwhile, in self-preservation mode, Delivery Man tipped the dolly to block the dog, and the house of cards tumbled down on my patio: 7 fell on the cat, the boxes fell on 7, 9, and Suzy, and in the cries and yelps and thrashing I didn't see Delivery Man take his dolly and leave.
The only real casualty in the whole dang mess was a bottle of Moisture Therapy lotion which leaked out over my invoice and the copy of the Avon Representative Times.
6:03:37 AM 
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