Past midnight on Friday - therefore in the wee hours of Saturday - someone tried to open my front door. I got up to check it out. When I turned on the light, there was no one. I turned off the light and looked as far down the street as I could.
Suddenly a boy stepped onto the neighbour’s yard and threw something FLAMING onto my car. It made a metallic sound as it struck the roof and part of it bounced off and onto the lawn, where it extinguished. I opened the door and yelled some unkind things about the idiot’s mother, then dialed 911. Two patrol cars arrived and determined that the flaming object was a merengue pie, set alight. (The burned merengue was the consistency of styrofoam, so I didn’t recognize it right away.)
They didn’t catch the culprit but told me that a group of hooligans had broken the lights on another woman’s lawn about a half-mile away.
I followed up on a lead - a visiting kid who was trying to talk the neighbourhood kids into breaking windows on some houses for sale - but nothing. (Although I must say that people around here are very nice about being asked “Is a hooligan visiting you this weekend?” by a strange woman on a Saturday morning.) If I see the kid again, I’ll know him. But I’d really rather not see him again.
To a certain extent, this type of behavior is a result of the safety of my community. I NEVER experienced anything like this in the Detroit Metro area. Parents didn’t let their middleschoolers run all over the place at midnight, unless they were bad parents.
And that’s a strong possibility here, too, that this is the product of bad parents. I know, I know, I’m supposed to be sympathetic to parents with out-of-control kids. It’s not easy raising a decent kid in this day and age. Etcetera.
However, I keep remembering this guy talking to my parents when I was a kid. I don’t remember the gist of the conversation, but I recall him saying, “I’ve raised my kids. Now they have to make their choices.”
After he left, my dad looked at my mom and asked, “He’s raised his kids?”
My mom said, “The older one is 12 or 13.”
“He hasn’t raised his kids,” Dad said. “He’s just gotten lazy.”
And so I pray to be left in peace, and for that boy and his parents. It’s hard to pray when I’m angry, and so I know I must let the anger go and concentrate on how sin hurts, so that boy is suffering though he enjoys it at the same time.
