I've lived here six years. This is a quiet community.
You get to know a place. The skateboarding kids with their ramps. The serious landscapers. The derelict van that never moves. The favorite grazing area for the rabbits. The popular teen's friends. The house with all the cobalt bottles in the main window.
You see the community through tortuous seasons: blistering summers, fierce winters, a hurricane. You see it through the long, drab, gray weeks of many Marches.
You share lawn mowers, ladders, drills. You collect each other's mail during vacations. You see owners put their homes on the market. You welcome renters, wish them well when they move away.
It's not always cozy. People squabble about the safety of the tot lot, about the constant litter, about how to prevent teens from drinking in the back woods, about the number of cars parking without permits. But when back-to-back blizzards dump thirty-six inches of snow and no plow shows up, the same people dig out each other's cars, plus the entire street.
It's a good neighborhood.
Then one night you drive past a man lying on his stomach on the street with his eyes closed and blood pooling out of his mouth and five bullet holes in his chest, and the next thing you know you're one of those people you've always seen on the evening news saying, "I've lived here six years. This is a quiet community …"
June 24, 2006 at 10:49 pm |
Yes, I saw the body. Two police cars were already on the scene, but my driver’s window still passed within four feet of the victim. From the look of things, the shooting occurred only five minutes before I passed by. The victim was pronounced dead at the local hospital.
If there’s a positive, it’s that the murder wasn’t random. It erupted between people having a fight of some sort. That’s not terribly reassuring, but it would feel much more frightening had it been a random act.
June 25, 2006 at 4:46 am |
There is not a lot a person can say to this sort of post- I could say it’s a terrible occurence, I could tell a story that is related, but instead, I’m going to sit here, and read through your post again, then proceed to feel sad about what is happening to the world.
June 25, 2006 at 10:13 am |
That is the saddest thing ever. Almost nightly the police helicopters are overhead, spotlights scanning looking for a perpetrator of some crime. I have never seen someone murdered, It must have been a tramatic experience for you. It makes the adolescent vandalism in my neighborhood seem insignificant.
June 26, 2006 at 7:39 pm |
Yet another example of your strong writing, happychick …
Not traumatic, just disturbing and bizarre. I haven’t got the image out of my head yet.
On a different note, the responses of people who saw me on TV have been funny. Students in my graduate class, friends of my wife, people in my church keep telling me they saw on me on TV, and ask if I’m okay. On Sunday the rumor mill had it that I’d discovered the body and resuscitated the victim. The contrast between the event itself and the odd, almost comical notoriety of my brief TV appearance has been weird.
June 26, 2006 at 11:01 pm |
How do you to propose eradicating that scene from your memory?
June 27, 2006 at 12:39 am |
I guess it’s not something to be forgotten. I don’t know who that man was, but he was a real person and should be grieved, even in a small way by someone like me who only saw him in his last moment.
I guess what I should have said instead was that the image comes to mind more frequently than I’d like. What a sad and horrible way to die. It calls to mind something very existential about our condition, something ugly that I’m strangely reluctant to relinquish.
June 27, 2006 at 1:05 am |
Maybe you should try some Flomax — I heard it can make a difference in just one week!
June 27, 2006 at 12:52 pm |
time changes everything, even the one place you always call home.
what can i say? it seems nowadays, taking one’s life is just as easy as grabbing someone else’s bag. no remorse and guilt, for taking somebody else’s life. (SIGH) this world and all it’s occurences (esp. BAD ones) sometimes makes me feel real ‘old and futile’… i just feel downright SAD right now
June 29, 2006 at 12:31 am |
Thanks for chiming in, Mayang, although I’m sorry to have depressed you. It’s tough when life’s small, everyday graces are overshadowed by rare but horrific tragedies. Just think — I made it this far without ever seeing something like this. Maybe that counts for something.
July 3, 2006 at 11:11 am |
A follow-up note: the local paper reported that the night the man was shot and killed in our neigborhood, thirty of his relatives and friends stormed the emergency room demanding access to his body. When nurses told them that his body wasn’t ready for viewing, they jumped the desk and stormed through the ER looking for him. Two hospital workers were injured. State troopers and police from two counties were called in to restore order. Ambulances were directed to other hospitals for several hours. And three people were arrested by police and charged with something like disorderly conduct.
Apparently not the most law-abiding group of people …