Storytime

Once upon a time (six months ago) I lived in a small suburb of a moderately sized midwest city (now I actually live within the city limits of the same moderately sized midwest city - Movin' on up!). It was a decently well kept suburb and my neighborhood was mostly filled with your average middle class people. There was one family, however, that I would consider to be a bit trashier than the rest (no, not me - I put up a nice facade). I lived in a circle at the top of a hill and three houses counter-clockwise around the circle lived the trashy family. It seemed as though neither of the parents worked, their yard was never kept up (another neighbor mowed their lawn a few times because he was sick of looking at it), and the police visited a few times on domestic disturbances calls. So yeah, one of those families.

Anyway, one fine spring day I was sitting in my living room watching television. I noticed that the kids from the circle (including several from the trashy house) were playing baseball in the street - my house would have been their left field wall. They weren't actually using a baseball, but some kind of hard rubber ball. I watched them for a while and they ran through my yard several times to get their ball - no big deal. But then I noticed that the left fielder kept running through a flower garden that we had planted in the yard to get the ball, when he easily could have gone around. So I said something. My wife was semi-appalled and called me a grumpy old man yelling at the neighbor kids to stay off his lawn, but it wasn't really like that. The kid ran through the garden and ended up right under the window, so I asked him not to run through the flowers. I was even polite. But, of course, it scared the shit out of the kid, who wasn't expecting a voice to come from the house.

So, the kid apparently runs back in and tells his dad that I yelled at him. But the dad is a huge coward and doesn't want to confront me. Instead he comes out and picks up the bat and tells the kid to throw a pitch. The guy points his bat at my window - calling his shot. I was actually hoping that he would break one of my windows, because it would have been fun to fuck with him over it. Instead, after all his bat waving and posturing, he swings as hard as he can and pops the ball high up in the air. But not towards my house. The ball came down squarely on the roof on my next-door-neighbor's car, which was parked in his driveway, and set off the alarm. This, of course, was even better than what I'd hoped would happen. The trashy guy lived up to his reputation and dropped the bat and ran inside like a coward before my neighbor came out of his house.