What did you get your mom for Mother’s Day?

Flowers? Candy? Maybe a nice piece of chicken at a classy restaurant?

For my mom’s birthday, which seems to be on Mother’s Day every other year, I got her the one thing she has been asking for consistently for the last several months, the thing that every mother really wants: a 30,000-volt stun gun. This gift brings Mom more in line with the practice of her life’s central philosophy, “The bastards are going down.”

I could not begin to guess who the bastards might actually be. Every time I deactivate the crisscrossing lasers of my parents’ home alarm system in a mad dash not to wake up their army of defensive killbots, I think, “Where exactly do you think you live? Your house is forty minutes into the ‘burbs; the only reason anyone would be breaking in here is to find food they need to sustain them after accidentally getting lost in the dense woods surrounding your compound here. Alarm system. Sheesh. Eek! Killbots!”

Eight years after moving into a house so remote that the backyard has a naturally occurring spring, it occurred to Mom that there was a gap in her defensive net. Sure, the alarm and motion sensors would ward off burglars, pillagers and Vikings, but what was she supposed to do about the highwaymen and killers lurking in the shrubs of Summer Meadow Estates? In the near-decade she and my father have been living in this neighborhood, no one in a ten-mile radius has ever reported an attack, abduction, or suspicious character; that’s how stealthy the killers are. That was when she realized: I need to be able to electrocute the bastards.

And so that’s what I’ve given her. Never let it be said that I am not a loving son. Never content to simply tolerate my mother’s delusions, I insist on feeding them. Begin praying now for the first teenager who startles her in the grocery store parking lot.

Someone recently told me a story about seeing a lot of old people walking around with broom handles in the neighborhood; upon investigation, it turned out the old folks had the broom handles for beating back packs of stray dogs when they were out on walks. As far as anyone could tell, none of them had ever encountered a single dog in the history of these walks, but all of them were sure they needed their broom handles. It seems that Mom has taken this to heart, and that the AARP arms race is on.

(For the record, I did encounter a pack of stray dogs on a walk last week, and though they gave me a wide berth I’m pretty sure good ol’ fashioned punchin’ would have gotten the job done.)