Enter, stranger, but take heed
Of what awaits the sin of greed,
For those who take, but do not earn,
Must pay most dearly in their turn.
~ J.K. Rowling, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”
I’m continuing the tale from two weeks ago. Sorry about the gap. I had to make sure the Gulf of Mexico was still producing shrimp; it is.
To refresh, KM and I were taking our nightly walk after I had finished mowing the lawn. As we walked around the corner, I saw many of the family-filled homes already decorating for Halloween. It’s a two-mile walk that lasts about a half-hour.
We rounded another corner onto another street, talking about the upcoming beach trip to Blue Mountain in the Florida Panhandle.
Then I heard something nearby – some loud talking. A guy was standing at the bottom of his driveway and looked to be reaching inside of an old, small sedan of some kind. The car had seen better days, but it still sped away from the guy, who was yelling, and right toward us.
“Get out of the street!” KM yelled at me. It seemed to be a good night for raising voices. The guy in the yard was screaming numbers at the fleeing car.
The sedan zipped by and I saw the worn and grizzled face of the unshaven driver. He had seen better days as well, I thought.
The man who had been yelling was now running up his driveway, his large yellow lab keeping step.
“What’s the matter?” I yelled as he ran into his garage.
“He robbed me!!”
It was still light out, probably between 6:30 and 7:00. KM and I stood in the street in front of the victim’s house and waited. He soon came back out and told us he had just walked his dog to the end of the street and back. When he returned, the perp (“NYPD Blue” was a favorite of mine) was walking out of the garage. “He was carrying my gas can and a pair of my running shoes. I asked what he was doing and he dropped them and jumped in his car. I couldn’t decide whether to grab him or get his license number. I picked the license.”
“This guy has seen too many ‘Batman’ sequels,” I thought. But, “Good choice,” was what I said.
He called the police, and when we came back by about 15 minutes later, a patrol car was pulling up. We kept on walking, and the robbee waved at us. I had given him my name and number earlier in case he needed any Boy Wonders to join his caped crusades.
“Wow, that was crazy,” KM said as we finished our walk.
“Yeah, that was pretty bold going into his garage in daylight.” “Probably a drug addict who needed the gas to get back home, and thought he might as well grab a new pair of shoes as long as they were there.”
KM was silent. Then she said, “What if he went from here to our house?”
“I think he kept going,” I told her. “I don’t have any running shoes anyway.”
She was silent again but I could feel the wheels in her pretty head spinning.
“Well, what if his kids don’t have anything to eat and he needed the gas to get to a job?”
I had nothing for that, and we kept walking. The way KM sees it, it never hurts to try to think the best about our fellow men, even when they’re caught red handed.