Don't Shoot

Don’t Shoot

After an electrical outage left us without power for a dozen or more hours one day some years ago, my mother insisted we have a generator installed and the three of us share the cost. Resembling an HVAC compressor beside the house, it’s a big, ugly thing with a one-cylinder natural-gas-driven engine like a car motor that, despite its size, only handles a couple of rooms -- kitchen and appliances, one other room and one HVAC system. It comes on within a few seconds of the electricity going off; and for maintenance turns itself on and runs for a minute or so about once a month. It’s helpful for power outages plus gives us options when there’s a hurricane in the Gulf, before, during and after. 

October 1995 when Hurricane Opal came in, we had boarded up early morning and departed for Tallahassee, driving thirteen hours in the bumper-to-bumper traffic nightmare, finding overnight shelter there only in the parking garage of Tallahassee Medical Center. The next morning I phoned my neighbor Bill to ask if my house was still here. It was, no damage, but scroungy seaweed and debris a couple feet thick from St. Andrews Bay bottom, and two of the neighbors’ docks broken to pieces and deposited in my front yard. Huge azaleas and a cedar tree in the lower part of the yard killed by the wind and salt water. We wouldn’t plant that close to the Bay again, and haven’t. 

Hurricane Ivan in 2004 gave us greater damage: the high wind toppling an enormous hickory tree that was here over a hundred years ago, before the house was built. Falling, the hickory tree hit the front of the house, requiring the front porch area to be rebuilt. When Ivan struck, Linda, Kristen and I were in Atlanta for my prostate cancer treatment, returning the next day to a neighborhood that was without power for several days. When we arrived home, my mother had paid a “drive-by-contractor” ostensibly from Louisiana, to cut and remove the hickory tree, and told him that she was staying at my sister’s house. That night we had a few candles lit, but the neighborhood was in total darkness, no moon. Late evening a car drove up slowly, parked beside the house, and a man got out and closed the door quietly. Thinking he might have a car problem and need help, I watched from upstairs; but he moved to a first-floor window of my darkened house, obviously thinking nobody was home. When I opened my upstairs window and shined a flashlight on him, he fled to his car and drove quickly away. A gunshot through the window where he was standing and intending to enter would have stopped him permanently and satisfied my rage of the moment, but it would have left me with a shattered window to board up, and he was still outside, and castle law would not likely have held for me, and a flashlight proved just as effective.

Even in the darkness I identified the car, a 1995-96 era Chevrolet Caprice sedan. For absolute certain, it was the “contractor” whom in my absence my mother had paid to remove the hickory tree and told that she would not be home. He didn’t realize that someone else would be home.

Looking back, despite my anger that someone would purpose to enter, burglarize and possibly trash my home, the inclination to shoot was best not done. Not a good newspaper headline or TV story. “Priest ...”. And it could have been the basis of lifelong regret.

With a generator running, the house will not be dark next time.

TW