A Very Jon Thing

The women in my family have a Marco Polo account that the men are prohibited from participating in—a blessing of incalculable worth. Everyone knows that the quickest way to ruin any social media tool is to open it up to men. Anyway, Pam let me watch my daughter’s most recent contribution this morning in which she told the following harrowing tale.

At two o’clock in the morning, Jon and Kaitlin were awakened by the shrill piercing sound of sirens, several of them coming from somewhere very close. Soon the house was flooded with blue flashing lights. They both stumbled out of bed only to discover that their culdesac was full of police cruisers and their own driveway was blocked by a strange Jeep. Jon opened the front door and walked out onto his front porch. It was then that he noticed one of the police officers approaching the Jeep with his weapon extended! Suddenly my daughter’s peaceful culdesac looked like a scene from Criminal Minds.

For the next two hours the drama continued to unfold. A canine unit arrived unleashing bloodhounds into their backyard! Apparently, there had been a pursuit of the Jeep-driving suspect which had ended with the driver stopping directly in front of Kaitlin and Jon’s house, after which the suspect fled the scene and according to the neighbors security camera, made his escape through their backyard, jumping the fence twice and disappearing into the thick woods. The police were never able to find him, soon after jumping their fence, the trail went cold rather quickly, suggesting that he may have been picked up by an accomplice.

But as crazy as this story is, this isn’t the purpose of this particular blog post. No, the best part of the story was a small detail that Kaitlin shared that actually made me smile. During the midst of the drama playing out in his yard, my son in law did something so typical of him, so uniquely a Jon thing, that I have to share it. With police officers crawling all over the place outside, Jon quietly made his way back into the kitchen. There he prepared a tray of freshly brewed coffee with containers of sugar and several flavors of creamer, walked outside and presented the tray to the grateful police officers at 3 am in the morning, in the middle of an active investigation. Who in the world does that? My son in law, that’s who. This dude can always be counted on to disappear in the middle of a crisis and reappear with help in his hands. I could tell you one story after another of times where something like this has happened. He has a knack for it, a natural proclivity for thoughtfulness. We have a word for it in my family…clutch. 

Ladies and gentlemen, Jon Manchester is clutch.