Yknow… Sometimes in idle moments I wonder what happened to my mother to make her SO SCARED.
Something must have happened. You wouldn’t be that terrorized of ordinary daily living unless something had happened to you.
When DXH and I lived downtown, we had a beautiful old classic rich person’s house in the historic part of the city. It really WAS beautiful. And the people who had it before us added on to it, creating a little mansion with a huge living room, huge dining room, large breakfast room, vast kitchen, large laundry room, separate TV room, and four bedrooms.
The house was first-rate. The neighborhood left something to be desired, though. Like…basic safety. The place swarmed with scammers, rapists, and burglars.
DXH traveled off and on for his job and his civic volunteerism. When he would leave town, my mother would get all upset.
No kidding: she would be nigh unto frantic when he absented himself.
She lived, with my father, in Sun City, a mausoleum-like retirement tract that stood a 30- or 40-minute drive from our house, through unpleasant traffic.
But whenever DXH would leave town, she would volunteer to drive into the city and stay with me while he was gone. What on earth she thought she was going to do if the dread burglar/mad rapist actually did enter the house escapes me. But there she was.
What she thought she would do is shoot the ba*tard. She would always show up with a nice little revolver, which she would set on a TV table next to the fold-out bed where she slept. This would give me the willies — she did not have formal self-defense training, and I don’t even know if she had formal training in the use of a pistol. But my father did: he was a licensed firearms instructor. So…I expect she knew how to pull the trigger.
The question, o’course, was whether she knew when to pull the trigger.
And when not…
Most of all, though, what worried me was that she was so scared.
Now, in those days, women were scared. I was, too, when left alone in a house that any passing sh!thead could easily enter. And occasionally did enter… But…but…why was she SO damn scared she thought she needed a deadly weapon at her side, even when a large dog was sitting there guarding her?
Yes. “Scared” was why we owned a German shepherd…
I figured something must have happened to her. You surely couldn’t imagine yourself into a state of fear so elevated. She must have had something real to cause that terror.
If so, she never told me what it was. (Thank goodness: if she had, I would have been just as terrorized.)
One of the reasons my parents retired to Sun City was that people believed those stodgy realms were safer than safe. What could happen? Who would want to rape a wrinkled, gray old bat? Who would waste their time burgling the home of some wretch trying to live on Social Security?
Well. Stuff happened all the time. Overall, the public imagined that Sun Citizens were fairly affluent. They weren’t, but compared to someone living on welfare in South Phoenix, they appeared to be. So burglaries did happen. Stick-ups did happen. And the occasional bizarre rape did happen.
So the truth was, our house and neighborhood were at no more risk — or not much more — than their little retirement dream house out in the far western suburbs. But I didn’t know anyone else who felt called upon to keep a revolver at the side of their bed.
Here, where Ruby and I live now, is…safety-wise? About the same. Certainly no safer than anywhere else. Certainly not as safe as a place in a gated community or a high-rise with a security guard posted in the lobby.
But hereabouts I don’t feel at anything like the risk we sensed downtown. We have deadbolts on every outside-facing door and on every security screen door. Alarms on every window. And a dog that barks like a banshee. You couldn’t get in here without giving me plenty of warning to get out a different door or to lock myself and the dawg behind a solid-core interior door and call the cops.
{sigh}
But really: what a place we live in, eh? The Land of the Free and the Home of the Terrorized.
When I was a kid, my mother was wary…but we didn’t live inside a barricaded fortress. What do you suppose has changed? And how?
KeeeeRAAP!