Ever bought a crappy washing machine off of Crag’s list? We have. Yet, it can be fun (except for Cid, who is scared of it).
Oct
21
Me Sick
Micah takes a luke-warm bath to cool off on October 17. His fever ranges from 99.9 to 101.9. Two days later he gets better, but the doctor puts him on antibiotics for both his ears, which are infected.
Oct
05
In the bright Arizonan, autumnal morning, Jill and I take a walk while it’s cool. Micah’s in his stroller, and Cid is running along side of us. En route, we stop to look at a rummage sale that is selling the exact same freezer Jill and I were flirting with buying for the last few months. Finances, as they are, wouldn’t allow us to buy a new one; this one, however, looked promising to us. We talked the seller down to $45 in front of the well-trimed and well-kept front yard. We also buy some end tables from her. I go to get my car, but it won’t fit. The seller has her husband take it to our house for us.
This man tells us his name is Mark as he squeezes in some passive-aggressive jokes–he was none too pleased about how low his wife went with the freezer–as we load it onto his truck. When we get home, we shoot the breeze for a while.
A slender man in his 40s, Mark tells us about the neighborhood and the old man who died in our house. Mark’s mustache makes him look a little like Tom Selleck, and he works as an airline steward. He’s wearing a hat with the American flag, but it had green instead of red. He tells us all about our neighbors. You see, Mark is the kind of guy who is very active in the neighborhood. He puts together block parties, he knows everyone and everyone knows him. When you’re driving through the area, you can sometimes see him working in other people’s yards with the owner of the yard.
I break the conversation to tell him about an experience my wife and I had a week before. It was unnerving experience that occurred late at night. It was the kind of thing that makes you wish you owned a gun. Because we were already on edge after watching a unnerving thriller about home invasion that night, we were freaked out when a man knocked loudly on our door at 3:45 a.m. It was too dark to see the man when I got to the door, but I heard him yell something as I grogily worked my way to the door. I grabbed a Maglite, in case I had to do business with the stranger pounding at our door.
Mark interrupts the story before I could finish. This street has a lot of college kids who party at night, Mark says.
“I call the police all the time,” Mark, who lets a house down the street from here, says. “I knock on their door and, I say, shut it down. I call the police.”
The part of the story Mark didn’t hear though was the next morning when I Jill and I came home from church. I noticed something red on the door handle. I know it wasn’t there the day before. I tell my wife I think it’s blood. What else could it be? It was chilling to be sure.
I enter in the house and wash my hands. I then grab some bleach wipes and commence to wipe clean the handle, which becomes clean on the first stroke of the door handle. But I scrub it, just for good measure.
Mark’s advice was sound though: I should have called the police. When I got to the door, I heard a silhouette curse from my driveway. But moments before someone had probably knocked on our door for help, but who knows. I wasn’t going to call the police unless I knew that someone was still there. I open the flap that leads out to our back yard, the dog door. I call for Cid, who obediently arrives. But when I gesture towards the flap, Cid’s instincts kick in. It’s no use: he goes back into his kennel. He’s no dummy.
