Monday, February 4, 2008
The Neighbor Kid
I sat down to write with a few ideas banging around, but now, all I can think about is the screaming neighbor kid. I can't see him right now, but I know from the sound that he's in the back yard of the house nearest my office. He's been screaming for several minutes now, and I believe if whatever was causing it was bad enough to warrant that level of screaming he would have blacked out in the first 30 seconds or so. I'm not going to check on him because he's done it before. The first time was a nice spring afternoon. My wife was planting herbs and I, from inside the house heard a scream that had me outside, breathless, holding a baseball bat, and needing to fix a screen door that got in the way, only to have my wife shrug and ask if I thought we should go check on him. I volunteered to do it, and when I peeked inside their privacy fence the boy....a basically normal-looking 11 year old boy, was standing on a stump and red-faced, monkey screaming in the direction of his 4 month old lab, who had apparently already learned to ignore him. His mother's car was in the driveway, and the windows of the house were open, so I assume his mother had learned to ignore him as well. I scurried away so as not to be thought of as menacing this kid with stern looks and a bat. It's happened a few times since and I'm happy to say the family and dogs are all in tact by my count, and neither an ambulance or the police have shown up at the house while I've been around. As I sit here I know that if I grab a weapon and run over to see what the problem is I will only scare other people more than the screaming kid already has. So here I sit.....good ideas and intentions melted by the great volume of panic one kid is spreading over the neighborhood
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