Never A Dull Moment

Just when I thought I was at a loss for things to write about…

“POP!”

“POP!”

is what I hear from my living room last night. Jason rose before I did, walked outside and down the steps of our porch to see what was going on. Gunshots. Then, two “kids” (now that I’m of the ripe old age of 27, I call anyone under 23 a kid) in baggy, black hooded sweatshirts running down the street, a beat up old car following them. They turned and headed westbound toward the ocean, falling out of sight.

Suddenly, a noise from inside the house. Okay, sorry, I got caught up there for a second. No noise, fear not! Anyway, Jason came back up and called the cops who showed up less than 2 minutes later and promptly began searching the ground for shell casings.

Neighbors appeared from their darkened houses, and of course me, sitting in my pajamas upstairs, peeking out from behind the curtains like a little kid waiting for Santa. Turns out 3 other neighbors had called it in.

In the next few minutes, four additional cop cars had arrived. Jason stayed outside to talk to the officers, offering his description of what he had witnessed. The police left shortly after that and me…well, I went back to watching Rocky.

I have never felt unsafe on my street. I live in a decent area with good, law-abiding (for the most part, and as far as I know…) neighbors. And yet, we’ve had our car broken in to, our wheels stolen, our garage robbed, and there might be a wife-beater down the street (judging from his vocal outrages and the three detectives I saw entering his house one day). Oh, and now gunshots.

Yet, I still feel this is a relatively safe neighborhood, maybe because I’ve lived in much, much worse! However, as a mother, there is no neighborhood too safe, and gunshots are just not acceptable. I mean, what the F?

Part of me says “You can’t get away from violence. It is everywhere.” And another part of me says, “It’s time to get the fuck out of Dodge.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Losing It. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.