I know my man is waiting somewhere

God always has a way of making two people with very different personalities fall in love with each other. Sometimes you look at a couple and wonder how they clicked. For example, a professional female dancer marries an engineer who is not only shy, but also hates the limelight.

You attend a concert and see the wife seriously shaking... well (what her mama gave her) on the stage and the husband is seated at the farthest corner in a suit reading a newspaper not even raising his head once to have a glance at his wife on the stage! Not that he doesn't love her, he just isn't a showbiz person. Where on earth do such couples meet and who initiates the talk?

I am lucky enough to have had the chance to live with such a couple, my parents. My father was a very quiet man. Apart from being quiet, he was very unpredictable. Sometimes he would just walk past you in the house and slap you out of the blue then tell you the slap was meant for a mistake you made three weeks ago. He would then continue walking as if he did not slap you in the first place.

The only thing we would do in such a case was make faces behind him as he walked away; that, we were taught by my mother. Woe unto you if, by mistake, he turned to look back and found you making faces. He would just ignore you and continue walking. But three weeks later, be sure of an abrupt slap any time, any day, even in your sleep!

Those days, there were no mobile phones, so the only thing that could keep him busy in the house was the newspaper. He would read it over and over again as if he was preparing for an exam. He was also a home person. He never liked to leave the house unless it was very important. 'I am out with my boys' was never part of his life! If he got bored, he would lie on the sofa facing the ceiling with the newspaper covering his face.

On the other hand, my mother was just out of this world. Crazy is an understatement! From dressing my brothers in skirts to tying our hands and tickling us until we 'peed' on ourselves. She taught us the real meaning of fun. So many times, she filled a Sprite bottle with water then served it to our dad and sat there to watch his reaction!

One night, my father had travelled from Nairobi to our home in Eldoret and failed to inform my mother. So in the wee hours of the night, my brother heard someone knocking on the door and went to open it for my Dad. So no one else knew my Dad had come back apart from my elder brother.

My father, with all his quietness, joined my mother in bed without even waking her up to announce his arrival. Two hours later, my mother stretched her legs in bed knowing that she was alone only to feel someone's leg! She kicked once again to confirm and sure enough, it was someone's leg; and that someone was not small, so it could not be one of us.

Without a warning, she shot from her bed and ran out the bedroom screaming her lungs out. You know when you hear your mother screaming, you definitely know it is something very dangerous. If she can scream and run away from it, we had no business to try and see what it was. We shot from our beds and joined her in the living room and the screams became louder!

My mother kept telling us to lie down just in case the 'intruder' was going to shoot! Seriously, you only lie down when there is a ran