Well, I think I might have seen the cat you're talking about...
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Just thought of something this morning... and I don't think I've ever told this story before, so maybe I'll put it down today while I'm thinking about it....
Happens that a couple of years ago, I was down in California visiting a friend. I had just arrived at his house an hour or so earlier, and we were standing around in the kitchen discussing the neighbourhood and good places to walk to in the early morning as I often get up around 5 and like to go out on long morning walks.
I also enjoy walking late in the evening when I'm in a city, mainly to be alone for awhile because cities often feel quite oppressive in daylight, but are less so at night. And so I was asking if the area was relatively safe to go off wandering around after dark...
Well, he hesitates a little and says, "Uh.. yeah... it's probably safe to go wandering off in the neighbourhood just so long as you don't go down that-a-way, or along such-and-such street.... and best not to take a purse or anything like that with you..."
I'm not a nervous person at all, so I'm listening to all of these instructions but thinking "Heck, this looks like a pretty damned quiet area if you ask me... Probably crazier back home up in Canada".....
...but just then... I happen to notice a community-type newspaper sitting on the kitchen table... and on the upwards facing side, there's this composite sketch of a crazy-looking dude in a watch cap... with a small headline saying, "Drive-by shooter kills fifth victim".
I didn't say anything... not wanting to interrupt my friend's litany of "do's" and "don'ts" and special instructions, but I casually sidled over towards the table to read the accompanying story...
Seems this shooter-dude in the watch cap had been driving around shooting people in an area about... maybe 8 blocks away from my friend's house... and he had just shot 2 elderly people who were out walking their dog at 5 in the afternoon...
Now, I'm thinking to myself, "DAMN...these California people are tough buggers... I mean... going out walking AT ALL when there are drive-by shooters cruising around the area!!"... but I didn't say anything to that effect at the time.
Well, a few days go by and I go out walking around because it seems like nobody in the neighbourhood is too fazed by this shooter stuff... and I even go out wandering around late in the evening on a couple of occasions... and even managed to get a bit... lost (yes, I'll admit that)... and wandered down into a "BAD - DO NOT GO THERE!!" neighbourhood... and had to ask a jogger how to get back to where I had deviated from the trail... BTW, joggers are usually safe people to ask for directions... except that some of them are nervous and might zap you with a cattle prod or shoot pepper spray at you if you aren't careful about how you go about initiating contact... just a little tip for those who might be interested)...
In any case, nothing much bad happened during my wanderings... except for one night when a man who lives in an old truck with a tarpaulin over the top came sort of weaving halfway across a street towards me, but then... no doubt... seeing that I was dressed like a lumberjack in a pair of stomping boots... probably thought better of it and turned around and went back to his "home"...
Well, about mid-week, my friend and I decide to hike over to the nearby university to look at architecture and other interesting stuff... and while we're there on campus, there are these posters of the composite sketch on many of the doorways to the buildings... I don't give them any thought at all... having seen the picture in the paper and assuming that it is kind of "old news" by now, but my friend stops to read one of them and is suddenly going...
"Good God!!! Look at THIS!!! Some guy is going around shooting people in our neighbourhood!!!... The police department is having a citizens' meeting to discuss what to do!!!"
Me... "Uhm... yeah... Didn't you know about this already? It was on the front page of the newspaper on your kitchen table on the day that I got here.."
"Well NO!!! It's a crappy paper and I never read it!... This is terrible!! And you mean you KNEW about the shooter all week and you've been going out walking all over the place by yourself??!!"
"Uhm...well... yeah... I figured it was okay because you didn't seem too worried about it".
"Jeezuz!!! I didn't even KNOW about him!!"
Well, anyhow... that taught me something rather interesting about visiting strange places... I found out that you just can't depend on the "locals" to warn you about poisonous snake, scorpions, or drive-by shooters. Fortunately, the odds of a visitor being shot by a drive-by shooter are probably a helluva a lot crappier than being bitten by a rattlesnake...but it DOES happen... happened to someone from England who was visiting in Ottawa about 3 years ago... ..... Can you imagine the odds of that, eh?....
hmmm....just some Croc musings.... |
