I picked up the heeler Mom after four o'clock, and she was more than willing to leave the vets'. A bald patch around her left eye, and a long line of frankenstein stitches down the middle of her brisket. After discussing the basics of post-operative care, I bent down to quickly check her dew claws.

Clipped.

Dammit.

Expressed my displeasure to the veterinary aid, a friend we have known for many years, through at least three or four of her careers. She was actually quite proud of her clipping job. Naturally, the gal the wife gave the explicit instructions of leaving the dew claws alone did not pass those along to the gal doing the actual trimming.

Oh well, they'll grow back, long and sharp, eventually.

And they returned her sans collar. And both gals definitively stated she did not have one with her.

Well, sorry, but she had an orange one on when she left the house this morning.

A quick check of the back rooms found the orange collar, with blue leash still attached. And yielded the expected apology. But I suppose we still paid for the flimsy temporary leash they brought the heeler out on.

The really bad news was the expected post-operative restrictions on her diet.

No cheeseburgers. At least not for the first day.

Which yielded the expected "hey, you cheated me" glares as we drove past McD's.

Since it was close to five, and the wife had delivered the Explorer for a service job right after dropping off the heeler Mom for surgery, I stopped by her office to see if she needed a ride to pick it up.

Nope. She had that taken care of.

And her manner made it quite clear that she did not want me to know how she had taken care of getting the SUV picked up and delivered back to her.

You see, she's been giving her godson driving lessons, and experience driving our vehicle whenever she can. Something I have been less than pleased about, but yes, he's covered by our insurance. But he has his own Dad and step-monster to take care of those things, too.

So today, he's gone solo. With our Explorer.

Running errands that his own father clearly did not consider important enough to let the boy borrow one of their family vehicles to use.

But he arrives at the wife's office on time, and apparently intact, so the heeler Mom and I head home so that her daughters can give her intense smell inspections and sympathy looks and licks.

Almost two hours later, the wife finally comes home. With her godson.

They have something they want to show me. Outside.

Oh, joy.

I'm the only one who thinks to grab a flashlight, so clearly neither of them wanted me to have a really good look at whatever it was.

Which was an Explorer in the driveway with a crumpled right fender and shattered grill.

The story is that they noticed this damage only after stopping at the grocery store on the way home. And attribute it to a hit-and-run in the parking lot. A story that I made no effort to dispute.

Clearly, a trailer hitch ball went through the right side of the grill, breaking the plastic grill, warping down the right side of the bumper, and crumpling the right fender both in the front and in the back. And the front panel, supporting the headlights, is pushed down and in. Conservatively, I guess $1,000. If the frame isn't damaged. Cop on the scene suggested a large truck, high enough its bumper completely cleared ours, and the scratches on top of our bumper would support that theory.

And that's how we left it as wife took godson home.

But...

This was no minor backing error. These two vehicles hit with some major force.

Hard to imagine someone backing into a parking space with that much speed.

And the point of impact of the trailer ball is far to the right, just missing the headlight. Even with snow on the ground, most folks in this parking lot do a good job of staying in the diagonal parking spaces. To hit us where we were hit, a full-sized truck would have to be almost straddling two spaces.

Besides, this is only the second significant parking lot impact our vehicles have had in almost 25 years. What are the odds that the second such collision would occur on a perfectly fine afternoon, but on the one afternoon where our SUV is being driven solo by an inexperienced male teen driver?

Damn small, I would say.

Now, if instead we imagine said inexperienced teen driver whipping into an icy parking lot in a powerful SUV on his first ever solo mission, well, it isn't too hard to imagine him perhaps pulling into an icy parking space with perhaps just a little too much velocity. And many, if not all folks in this lot typically pull through to the space in the next aisle if it happens to be open, so it would be quite common for a large pickup to be parked there with its trailer hitch pointed right at our grill. And since almost all the spaces are angled to the right, the momentum of an Explorer with its wheels locked in a skid on ice would also slide it off towards the left.

Centering the actual impact with the hypothetically parked trailer hitch ball right near the right headlights.

I'm just sayin'...