Scott Hollifield: Disturbance-avoiding radar on the fritz

It was the first day of autumn - the early evening, actually - when I was called home to investigate a disturbance.
I never saw it coming. We were putting the finishing touches on another edition of the newspaper — yep, we still make 'em — and I could almost feel the warm familial greeting and taste the ice-cold beverage that I was sure awaited me at my aluminum-sided castle.
"Shall, I fetch your slippers, father?"
"Why certainly, Pumpkin."
No such luck. There was a disturbance under way.
Perhaps it was the changing of the seasons that jammed my radar, but I was woefully unsuccessful at avoiding this disturbance as I had avoided others in the past.
I thought I had gotten good at picking up the subtle and not-so-subtle hints of an impending disturbance, but this one caught me off guard and I failed to come up with an excuse, real or imagined, why I could not come home and investigate immediately.
Let me explain: I live with two women, the teenager I helped bring into this world and the woman, as old-timers in my neck of the woods might say, "what brung her."
No matter how you do the math, I'm outnumbered and undermanned.
When my old beagle Pete still roamed the Earth in search of rascally rabbits, I would sometimes sit on the steps of the porch, scratch him behind his floppy ears and say, "Boy, what have we gotten ourselves into?"
He would look at me with those sad, brown eyes, and I could sense his response: "You had me fixed, remember? You're on your own, dude."
They are spirited women who sometimes butt heads, and I have found over the years that my intrusion into the head-butting, whether by invitation or of my own accord, usually makes it worse or redirects the wrath toward me.
I have spent more than 20 years in offices where police scanners blared constantly - small-town newspapers can't afford to miss rear-end collisions (10-50s) or cattle in the roadway (10-68s) — and it has not been uncommon to hear "10-40 (fight in progress) between mother and teenage daughter." I would rather not have any publicly broadcast 10-40s at my aluminum-sided castle.
So, I developed a system. I call my wife once or twice a day and gauge how everything is going. Then I pick up our daughter from school and ask a few questions about her day before getting her where she needs to go and returning to work. Amazingly, through these brief interactions, I can sense potential disturbances and develop a strategy to avoid them, usually by inventing a major, breaking story that requires my attention.
"Honey, I've got to work late. We got cattle all over the roadway."
By the time I get home, the crisis is over and they are pals again. No escalation, no wrath, no deputies, no pepper spray.
This time, I sensed nothing until I got the phone call.
"Can you come home right now? She is driving me crazy."
I will not reveal which one made that phone call.
"Come home? ... Uh, we've got cattle ... uh, rear-ended ... oh, I'll be right there."
And so, like an unlucky deputy dispatched to a 10-40 between mother and teenage daughter, I went off into the fresh autumn evening to investigate a disturbance.
It turns out there were only a couple of minor infractions. This was not a felony-grade disturbance. For once, my presence did not escalate tensions, and I emerged relatively unscathed by either party.
But the fact remains, I failed to avoid it.
I've got to get my radar checked.