The Saint Valentine’s Day Manhunt
So it seems that one of the California wildfires was started by a boy playing with matches. The police won’t release the name or age of this kid, and who can blame them? Half of L.A. and a large part of Mexico would be hanging him from a tree right about now. While reading of this, I was reminded of a “situation” that occurred in my family several years ago, when the police had to protect our identities too. I raised my children in this small college town in Arkansas. For seventeen years, I was a fish out of water, but it was the best pond in the world at the time. Clean, safe, and friendly, and nothing much ever happened there. I never thought my family would be the talk of the city, until…
It was Valentine’s Day, and my son was fifteen. My mother lived in some apartments a little down the road from us, in a complex that was separated from ours by a park. The park was nothing much, just a pretty little patch of grass with a few benches, some
playground equipment, and a creek that ran through the middle of it.
I love February 14th, and whether single or attached, have celebrated it with exuberance, shopping for just the right candy and stuffed toys for my children, a big box of chocolates for my mother, and sometimes, if I’ve been good, a little box of Whitman’s samplers for myself. On this particular Valentine’s Day, we swung by my mom’s house with a big red truffle-filled heart and some flowers. She wasn’t home. My son said he would take the stuff in (we had a key) and would wait for her (translation: play on her computer). He said he’d just walk back to our apartment.
It was beginning to rain. Well, it had been raining for several days, so actually it was restarting. As my daughter and I drove home, it began to pour. We parked, ran up the stairs to our little abode, and I soon started making dinner.
About an hour later, there was a knock at the door. There stood my son, looking like a drenched Labrador Retriever; his hoodie, jeans and shirt were soaked, and he was missing a tennis shoe. He had decided to walk home from my mother’s, and took a shortcut through the creek. He fell in, and the current was strong. He’d pulled himself up by grabbing onto a tree limb, but one of his black Converses had decided to go its own way.
I briefly lectured him about the strength of the currents (a few local people had recently drowned) and told him to go change clothes while I finished making dinner. Soon, he reappeared, dry and happy, and joined my daughter in the living room to play a video game.
Another knock on the door. This time it was two police officers, a man and a woman, rain-spattered official raincoats covering their uniforms. “Ma’am, we don’t mean to bother you, but we’re doing a door-to-door search of everyone in the area. You don’t have any teenaged boys who’ve been over by the park recently, do you?”
I kind of non-chalantly pointed to my son, and said, “I sure do.”
He looked at me incredulously. “Lady, don’t you watch T.V.?” I was confused. He asked if he could use my phone, and without waiting for an answer, came inside and called his boss. “You can call off the search–we found him,” the officer said. He asked for my son’s name, and gave his description and our address to the person on the other end of the phone. When he hung up, he proceeded to relay the following story:
A passing driver had seen my son fall into the creek, but didn’t see him emerge. The
driver called 9-1-1, and thus began one of the biggest search-and-rescue missions in our town’s history. While my son was walking the short distance home, lamenting the loss of his shoe, newscasters were interrupting regularly scheduled programming to announce his possible drowning. Hundreds of people were dispatched from all of the local emergency agencies, including a special team of experts. It was the top story on the five-o’clock news. “We were trying to send out our new emergency helicopter, but the weather was too bad,” the policewoman told us.
The other officer asked my son, “What were you thinking, going through that creek to get home?” He almost made it sound accusatory, as though my son had stopped in the middle of an intense current in the middle of a storm to make a sinister drug deal on his way home from Grandma’s house.
My eldest offspring, in his usual communicative manner, just shrugged his shoulders. Knowing him as I do, this was a good enough answer for me. He really didn’t know. He just decided to do it. His heart’s as good as gold, but his brain works in mysterious ways sometimes.
I thanked the police officers and before they left, said, “If anyone comes across a black Converse tennis shoe…” I tried to ignore their angry glares.
The ten o’clock news announced that the Mystery Boy had been found. By this time everyone in town knew about this story. It made the front page of the newspaper the following morning, and my children were celebrities at their schools. All of the kids in town had been talking about it on the Internet. My daughter was thrilled because a teacher had bribed her with candy to get up in front of the class and regale her fellow students with the entire scoop.
The newspaper tried to slant their cover story to make it sound as though my son had been up to no good, which really infuriated him. But I tried to explain to him that they had to, because in actuality it was a huge non-story, “The Big Lebowski” of our town. Nothing had happened. He didn’t get washed away by the current. He didn’t drown. The candy got delivered. Hundreds of people had gathered to look for someone who wasn’t missing. I wanted to write a letter of thanks to the local paper for everyone’s concern and kindness, 
because if something had actually happened, it was good to know that they’d taken such quick action. I wanted to write this letter anonymously, knowing that we’d just wasted a whole lot of taxpayer dollars for nothing. The paper wouldn’t let me stay anonymous, and the Chief of Police advised me against ever using our names in association with this event. They’d even held a special meeting and changed their rules about releasing names to news organizations, in order to spare my family from the publicity and the possibility of angry throngs of citizens who’d be banging on my door with a battering ram, torches in hand, ready to run us out of town.
So my son was a big fish in a little pond for a moment there. A big, anonymous fish in a raging current. And we never did find that shoe. But he’s alive. Happy and healthy, and one of my greatest joys.
Somehow, I don’t think the kid in California is going to fare so well.
15 Important Things I Do To Warm Up For Writing
1: Read blogs. Like this one. And this one. And this one. Oh, and this one, this one, this one and this one.
2: Create important works of art (like the one above).
3: Pretend that I’m a world-famous concert pianist. You can do this yourself. All you need is this and this . When you’re finished playing, do this.
4: Improve my word skills.
5: Motivate myself to become more physically active.
6: Search for ideas on finishing the upstairs bathroom.
7: Keep on top of important news. Like the latest toy recall from China.
8: Research appetite suppressants and health products.
9: Watch the “Chocolate Rain” video. Again.
10: Satisfy my morbid curiosity.
11: Catch up on my reading of important literature.
12: Check my Karma. So far, so good.
13: More honing of artistic skills on Mr. Picassohead.
14: Um… do other important stuff.
15: Compose a sentence or two for upcoming article.
Drama Queens, Kings, Princes, Princesses, Dukes, Duchesses, Barons, etc.
“Did you see that?” I asked Tom as we were driving around a few weeks ago.
“No. What?”
“A woman was sitting on her porch with no top on. No top and no bra. Just shorts. I swear it.”
“Old or young?” he asked sort of wistfully.
“Young. She was sitting on a chair on the front porch with her dog. She looked sleepy or hungover or something. There must be something wrong with her.”
Tom sighed, obviously disappointed that this Kodak moment had been wasted on the likes of me.
“Go on. Drive around the block. I don’t care,” I told him. And I truly didn’t. My Penthouse centerfold days are long behind me. Okay, okay, I never had Penthouse centerfold days, but if I had, I’d be retired by now. Anyway, he drove optimistically around the block, but when we came back to the house on the hill, the young woman was gone.
“Sorry,” I said, rather insincerely. Because the fact of the matter is, this kind of stuff is just not that unusual around here. The drama in this area is so pervasive, someone should be walking around with an armload of Oscars, handing them out on a daily basis. I’m sure there will be another topless woman in Tom’s future, just like there was the masturbating woman he saw at the post office a few months ago. That one broke his heart.
“We all just stood around and pretended she wasn’t doing it,” Tom told me. “It was so sad.” It sounded sad, too. The woman was out of her mind, and was asking confused questions of the postal worker at the counter, none of which had anything to do with the U.S. mail.
All of this came to mind earlier today, when I walked out of Walgreen’s. On the walk to my car, which took all of thirty seconds, I saw the following:
- A woman who appeared to be in her sixties was yelling at the wind, or God, or the
ghost of her dead husband Floyd, I guess. There was no one standing in the direction that she was shouting.
- A humongously round man who was trying to figure out what to do with this toddler, who was screeching at the top of her pink-shirted lungs. The poor fellow was immobilized; he was carrying a big satchel, and couldn’t pick up the kid. Every once in a while he’d try to budge her by pulling her up by her arm, but she wasn’t buying it, so he sort of dragged her a few inches, let her sit and screech, then repeated the process over and over. I figure they should reach their destination some time tomorrow afternoon.
- Four women standing under a tree next to a convenience store, fighting. There were two main fighters, a pretty young black woman and a harsh-looking middle-aged white woman who sported short, crayon yellow hair and a big white t-shirt. The black woman was on a tirade– I don’t know what the other woman did, but it seemed that the general consensus was that she had this speech coming to her. The young woman screeched and ranted while the others softly chimed in and nodded their agreement. The older woman was agitated– “I done told you I was sorry,” she yelled, puffing on a cigarette.” She wasn’t going to be let off so easily.
“Well you shouldn’t have done it in the first place!” The other woman screamed. She was angry, I tell you.
Whew! I got into my car. I didn’t even want to see what else was going on around me.
And the Oscar goes to…hell, I don’t know. How does all of this happen? I’m just telling you about this one little space and time, but it goes on constantly– it seems that when the weather’s pretty, the streets are packed with people, and you can see their relationships playing out in living color — some are holding hands, some are making deals, some are talking to themselves or stripping, riding bikes, or walking big dogs. Others are just being neighborly, and some are wearing boxing gloves. Sometimes there’s gunfire.
It’s not all of Dayton– the closer you drive to suburbia (not that suburbia is all that appealing either), the calmer things are, but this area that I’m living in gets a little insane. It’s crazy and colorful, and often sad and scary. I wish I were a super hero. “Never fear–Dayton Girl is here!” Of course, I’d be built a lot like the woman pictured above, and blond to boot. I’d fly around the city, handing topless women shirts, conversing with lonely ladies who talk to themselves, helping fat guys calm their toddlers, busting up fights, and hypnotizing people into believing the whole “hugs, not drugs” thing. Maybe something less shmaltzy. “Hacky sack–not crack.”
I don’t imagine that the antics that go on in this area are necessarily that much crazier than what goes on behind closed doors in many houses in the burbs. Maybe it’s the fact that the houses are smaller around here that so much of the drama goes on outdoors. Maybe this unnerves me so much because I’m from the south, where people tend to keep their alcoholic tirades genteel and air their dirty laundry in their own back yards. In whispers.
There are good aspects to this town and good people in this neighborhood. I’m making new discoveries and meeting some great people. I plan to write about some of this in my next post or two. I truly don’t mean to whine or complain. It’s just that when I see some of this stuff, I don’t know what to do with it yet. I’m learning, but in the meantime, I’m dumping it here. Sorry, you poor readers.
I’ve just never lived in a place like this.
