Watch This Spot

Rats!

I miss out on all the good stuff in our neighborhood.

In all the years Ginny and I have been active in Neighborhood Watch I’ve only called the cops once.

That was a few years back when I witnessed a young man climbing in the back window of a nearby house. I called 911 to report a break-in in progress and two patrol cars came immediately. The patrolmen apprehended the suspect youth.

Turns out that he lived in that house. But he’s snuck out to visit some girl and was trying to creep back in without waking his parents when I saw him.

Trouble in the camp!

I bring this up because of a phone call I received Monday concerning our Neighborhood Watch… But I’ll come back to that call in a minute.

First, I want to digress to our week just past.

Back on Labor Day Ginny fell sick. Her blood sugar fluctuated all over the place. Unpleasant symptoms accompanied that. And my poor beauty felt so lethargic that she could not even hold up a book to read for a week. When she was able to read, she chose Miss Pickerel Goes To Mars, a child’s book Ginny first read when she was nine or ten years old. Last week she took comfort going back to her childhood favorite.

While she was down, her normal home duties fell on me. I had not realized how much she does around here besides her work at her office. I had to deal with banking, and the insurance company and grocery shopping as well as nurse her with ice/hot bandages and chicken soup.

She tried to go to work Thursday, but got too sick at the office and had to come home. But by Sunday she felt better, her blood sugar stabilized and Monday she returned to work.

Our youngest son, Donald, entered seminary last week to study for the ministry. We took him out to lunch Sunday afternoon to hear all about it.

He’s taking a systematic theology course and an introduction to the Old Testament class.

His professor began class by talking about allegory and typology—the school of thought that sees a foreshadowing of New Testament events in the Old Testament.

For instance, the professor used the example of the Israelites passing through the Red Sea as a type foreshadowing baptism.

Donald raised his hand saying, “Then none of God’s people got baptized. Only the Egyptian army got immersed. The Israelites never even got wet”.

Yep. My boy’s going to go far in that seminary.

Then Ginny got to telling Donald and teasing me about that pool timer (see my Sept. 8^th posting, “And Time Shall Be No More”).

The two of them laughed at me.

I told Ginny, “I liked you better when you were too sick to talk”.

We all laughed so hard I spilled my tea.

Donald’s heart seems inclined toward work in a rescue mission among the bums. When he was still in high school, one summer he won a scholarship in physics to work at the Los Alamos Nuclear facility in New Mexico for six weeks; when he returned to Jacksonville—without having blown up the world—he moved into the Circle Of Love mission to serve 24/7 for six weeks at their soup kitchen in a Northwest Jacksonville slum.

My son impresses me.

He’s real.

Anyhow, Ginny’s back to work now, Donald’s tormenting seminary professors, and I mowed the grass today before I got that Neighborhood Watch phone call.

The caller told me all about a problem house in the area. There are 57 houses in our cul de sac and I can see this one from my living room.

It seems that some young people, renters or maybe just squatters, have moved into that building and live an alternate lifestyle.

Very alternate!

The phone caller explained how several folks have complained to the cops, to the City Counsel, to the Zoning Board, and to the Code Enforcement Agency.

Rats in the offending yard is one major problem.

The caller sent me e-mail copies of correspondence with the various agencies and gave me a blow-by-blow account of political actions taken.

Then the caller casually mentioned the two young women who’ve been sunbathing naked on the roof of the house in question.

I looked out the living room window.

No one up there.

“Why did you call me about all this stupid political stuff and not call me about the girls on the roof naked?”.

“I didn’t think—you being religious and all—that you’d be interested,” she said.

Rats! Once again I suffer for my Christian faith.

I never get to see any of the good stuff that goes on in my own neighborhood.

Where are my binoculars?

That might be a tufted titmouse on that branch.

I’m going to sit here and bird watch for a while.