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August 04, 2007
ENOUGH WITH THE DRAMA, ALREADY
Good Lord. Is it a full moon? Is it some weird, funky mojo? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?
I was sitting here in my office late this afternoon, minding my own business, when I heard a siren whoop. Just once, that sound that says, "Pull over. I'm right behind you. You should be paying attention." And I assumed it was exactly that, an officer pulling over a speeder or something. I was reading, so I wasn't really tuned to what might be happening outside.
Not so much with the speeder.
Dave came upstairs a few minutes later and said, "Why are firemen at our house?"
"Really?"
"No. Across the street."
I got up to go see. There were the paramedics and the police cars and a whole group of people crouched around a body on the sidewalk across the street. Both of us worried at first that it was the mom in the house directly across. She's not much older than I am, I think, but she had a stroke a couple of years ago. So we worry. But one of the daughters was there and she didn't seem to be freaked out, which would most likely have been the case were her mom the victim.
Eventually--because it's free and non-shaming to gawk at a disaster from your living room, unlike when driving past in your car--I was able to tell Dave that it was an older (70's?) male and not the mom. He was wearing a neck brace and they put him on a body board, so we suspected he'd been hit by a car. But after he was loaded in the ambulance and driven away, one of our other neighbors marked some spots on the sidewalk near where the man had been lying. As if to indicate rough or upraised patches in the pavement. (Though as I said to Dave, the fallen person would have to be fairly old to sustain that kind of damage just by tripping on the sidewalk. You'd have to be pretty frail.)
Christ. Cops in my backyard, a twice-dead uncle, now a mortally wounded man who was brought low by a crack in the sidewalk. What is it with odd and dramatic happenings around me lately? Could we please just stop with that before school starts and I infect a couple hundred students with my chaos/tragedy field? Please?
Posted by sally at August 4, 2007 10:40 PM
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