Saturday's barbecue at the parents' house went well. The Midsummer's Night Cookout, I called it in my Evite. I'm so clever.

Brad summed it up so well: "Hey, thanks for having us at your place.� We had a lot of fun -- sitting on a backyard patio, drinking beer, eating burgers and playing mindless lawn games on a breezy evening are what the summer should be all about, and we so rarely get the chance to do that."

Yeah, that's the stuff.

I made the mistake of letting the straining spoon I was using to deep fry the fries hang off the edge of the table when I wasn't holding it. I'd put a tray table out on the walk on the side of the house so that the frying wouldn't smell up the kitchen and the oil wouldn't splatter. Instead, it did splatter when I absentmindedly held the strainer holding the rinsed, sliced potatoes over the fryer (I was going to simply slide the last batch in rather than place them in) and the water dripped into it, making it pop and sizzle and splatter my hand and arm in three or four places. Ouch. And while the straining spoon was hanging off the edge of the table, it dripped oil onto the slate of the walk (really old, undecorative slate, not like it was a really nice walk or anything), so that will be stained for a while.

But it's not that big a deal. I don't know why I mention it.

The coolest thing that happened � OK, one of the coolest things � was the accident. Late in the evening, after we'd eaten and played bocce (that was also one of the coolest things, what a great game � and you can drink while you play!), we're sitting inside, several people on the couch in the TV room, the rest of us on chairs in the adjacent dining room.

Then we hear a crunch outside. The girls � Casey and Erica � on the couch turn to look out the window.

"An accident?!" I ask.

"Yep," Casey says.

The rest of us go to the windows and see a minivan just down the street, its right front wheel up on the curb where it had hit a sign just in front of a telephone pole. No other cars around.

"I wonder if we should call the police," someone said.

"I'm going out to take a look, see if they're OK," Brad said, already on the front porch. The car hasn't moved in the minute, minute and a half we've been watching.

"OK, I'll call the police," I say.

I do, the dispatcher thanks me, and I hang up.

"It's moving!" someone says. But it only goes a few feet and then stops on the side of the road, its flashers blinking.

Just then, a police car speeds down the street, lights flashing, from the other direction, where the police station is, just at the other end of my parents' street. It's not more than half a mile away. Probably more like a third.

We all go out to the porch. Brad said it was an older woman driving and there were "like six people in there." He asked if they needed anything and they said they didn't, but he thought the car was pretty badly damaged � at least the front axle was � and that he didn't think it would get very far.

So they got the cops. And, boy, did they, because another minute later, a second cop car pulled up, lights flashing.

Now, to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, I want to tell you about the town of Little Silver, New Jersey, where this happened here. They three stop lights, five police officers and four police cars, but in a few minutes the Scene of the Crime had six police officers and five police cars, being the biggest thing happening on a Saturday night, and everybody wanted to be a part of it.

Or something like that.

We watched for a while, then went back inside. Eventually, a flatbed tow truck came down the street and one cop blocked off traffic in one direction, diverting it down the adjacent street.

And soon, some people left and others went to bed and that was the night.

Oh, and someone at work e-mailed me this. It's from Interstate 5 somewhere out West.