Wait... Who Did What Now?

Ok. This one takes a bit of explaining and suddenly shifts gears a few times so stay with me.

We are members of a local pool club so my wife bought the boy some water toys that are more appropriate than the bath toy selection we normally bring with us. She bought a set of something called “Toypedos” which are a set of colorful, torpedo-shaped underwater throwing/diving toys.  They are remarkably hydrodynamic and travel forever if you flick them just right. The package says you aren't supposed to throw them at anyone. Sureokwhatever.

Anyway, my kid loved them to the point where he clumsily carried the whole set with him for days afterwards. Occasionally, he will take a toy to bed with him when it is time for his nap. These were his toy of choice for a little while.

He was sick this week. Nothing serious, but he had a high fever as a side effect of an ear infection, so he spent the past two days at home with Mommy instead of going to daycare. Mommy decided to take advantage of his extended naptime to take care of some e-mails and other computer-based stuff.

My wife and I occasionally get e-mails from our church telling us about current events, requesting volunteers for things that need to get done, the church's vision for the future, etc. The last one we got (entitled Vision) she couldn't read because it was in a more recent version of Word than she had on her computer so she sent it to me at work for me to convert. I did so and sent it back. My wife then sent me a short, one-line email telling me how the poor sick boy was doing.

Well, at least she thought she did. Fast forward to tonight.

My wife was taking care of some of the decorating for Vacation Bible School at the church when the pastor approached her with a look of genuine concern on his face and asked if “if I was okay”. My wife replied, in a confused and now-borderline-concerned manner “He's fine... Why?” He says “Well, I got the e-mail you sent and I didn't know what it meant...” The one-sided conversation lurched along in a very awkward manner for about 20 seconds before it hit my wife what had happened.

She had accidentally sent the pastor the infinitely cryptic message, entitled “Vision”: “He went to sleep with his toypedos at 2pm”. This apparently caused the pastor to deduce that I was ill – down with a case of the toypedos, I guess. He never heard of that (maybe vision-related?) illness, so he looked it up, but nothing he found made any sense whatsoever, so he thought he would ask her to see how I was doing.

She cleared things up, but I shudder to think of the possible connections he could have made while trying to parse the sentence “He went to sleep with his toypedos at 2pm” into a reasonable, logical reflection of his worldview. I can come up with a few family-friendly guesses from his point of view, but they are all very unlikely or completely insane.  One guess involves hostages and secret codes, for instance.

Unfortunately, I can come up with quite a few family-unfriendly ones as well... I don't think she helped the matter by sending him the photo above. If the sermon next Sunday turns out to be a fire-and-brimstone style rant entitled “Shame on You, You Horrible, Horrible Person” that seems to be directed entirely at me, I will know for sure what he believes really happened...