If any of you read my last blog, talking about "fear" and practically chastising my neighbor who wouldn't let her kids out to play in our *cough* troubled neighborhood - then you'll get a kick out of this....
Once again, let me remind you that we live in a quiet neighborhood (cranberry bog in back yard, wooded park with bike trail across street). Nothing ever happens in this town. Ever. The most exciting news that hit our town lately was that the PTA voted to increase school lunches by 25 cents - seriously.
I have always lived in towns like this, suburban/rurual areas in the woods - in the same type of town where nothing happens. I am completely naive as to what city life is like. I have never lived in a city (I worked in Toledo, OH for a few months, buts thats about it) I get my "understanding" of what its like living in cities and urban areas from rap songs...I have no clue what it is like to live in "fear."
Until last night.....
I had spent about 10 hours working on the Studio project and was exhausted, and I went to bed around 11:30pm (yes, I know, "lame" for a Saturday night). But at 2am I woke up to the sound of shots being fired IN MY FRONT YARD! I woke up, scared out of my mind, my husband beside me "saying what the hell?!" over the sounds of (what I thought) bullets hitting our bedroom window. Our three dogs (one of whom can hear a pin drop in China and will howl when she does) were barking and freaking out downstairs. So place yourself in my position - waking up out of a dead sleep, to the sound of gun fire, dogs barking, my hubby yelling...needless to say I was pretty scared!
After the shots were fired, and the house quieted down...Mike and I peeked out the window to see what all the commotion was about. You should have seen the two of, in our pjs, hiding behind the curtains trying to look out over the darkness....and there was nothing. Not one person. Not a car. Nothing.
We stayed at the window for about 15 minutes. I could literally hear my heart beating through my chest. "Is that a person over there in the woods?" "What the hell was that sound?" "Are the neighbors home?" When we finally tired of waiting for our assassin to emerge from the woods, we went back to bed.
We literally climbed back into bed, when suddenly we heard MORE SHOTS being aimed directly at our house! "What the hell is that?!" "What do they want from us?" My super-hero hubby sprang from the bed, rushed over to the window, and peered out into the street. "Oh damn! Its just a bunch of kids in a car shooting paintballs at our house!" And he was right. A car that had been driving up and down our street that night had taken the liberty to repaint the front of our house.
When we got up this morning we took a drive down the street - and all the houses had been hit. And we laughed together when we thought of how scary it was to wake up like that in the middle of the night! But then we thought, wow, imagine living in an area (perhaps in a city) where actual REAL bullets were fired at your home and waking up to THAT? I cant imagine the fear that some people live with. Not knowing if you're going to make it through the night in your own bed?
It makes me grateful to live in the area I do, even if we do get an occasional "drive by shooting." It also makes me consider moving to that gated community down the street...dont those speed bumps prevent drive-bys from occurring? I'd like to see those kids make a speedy getaway over those things....
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2 comments:
So I'm guessing this experience does not move you and your husband to consider taking up paintball as a new hobby? :)
I have a co-worker who lives in what could perhaps best be described as a "fringe" community here in Charlotte, wherein he and his wife regularly DO hear gunfire and witness drug deals in progress "down at the corner," so to speak. I asked him about living in those kind of circumstances, and he said that they wanted to live in an area that would eventually turnaround (sort of buy-in now, get rewarded later kind of approach), and that for now, they just live with the "quirks." Referring to routine gunfire as a neighborhood quirk is a little beyond my threshhold for living with, but I suppose it suits him fine. He said that when shots ring out, he and his wife just hit the deck and wait it out. Some of their neighbors are charming senior citizens who have spent their adult lives watching their neighborhood fall apart, and they take encouragement from the fact that those people have managed to survive -- so I suppose they reason that they can too. But this does happen fairly often, and occasionally, they find slugs in the exterior walls of their house, or spent shells lying around on the sidewalk or driveway. To date though, no one has assaulted them directly...yet.
I think this gets back to the idea of tolerance -- what level of societal decay are people willing to live with, and what level will be enough such that they flee?
"Frontier living" has always been dangerous. A hundred years ago, you could have stayed in Illinois and had a settled social order, or moved to Oklahoma and made your own laws. High-risk/high-reward works well for some people, less well for others.
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