A day of labor...

Still sore from my fall, disconcerted, and very tired, I nonetheless spent the day laboring.  It is hard for me, at times, the days where I know others are gathered together and I am home alone.  I distracted myself by cooking.  Of course.

Since I bought the peppers Wednesday, I made my Black Bean Soup with Roasted Bell Peppers, adjusting the cumin and chili powder a bit.  I had a bowl for my dinner.  I also made a batch of Spicy Dr Pepper Pulled Pork, since I was cooking, you know.  And, having discovered that I had but just two more bottles (4 cups) of vegetable stock, I made another pot.  With the root vegetable bisque I create as a by-product of stock making, I put away 20 meals and 16 cups of stock in my freezer.  Saturday, I made a batch of Creamy Lemon Crumb Squares and Sunday, to go with the Basil Burgers I cooked, I made a batch of The Perfect Cookie, a.k.a. Brown Sugar Oatmeal Cookies.   All this means that my freezer is full, as are all the dessert containers on the sweets shelf in my kitchen freezer.  Tastiness abounds.

With the dishes all done, I turned to my puppy dog.  I cut Amos' hair, combed out his ears and tail (using detangler), and pulled the hair from the inside of his ears.  UGH.  Amos has yet to forgive the ministrations visited upon his person by his puppy momma.

That left the laundry I've been studiously ignoring all week, since it is so stinking, steamy, sticky hot outside.  Much to my dismay, I discovered that the reason I have not been able to find Amos' bath towels, is that I left a wet load of laundry in the dryer some two weeks ago (or there about).  DOUBLE UGH.  So, I re-washed that load and sorted out the other three had I brought down to do.  Wash.  Dry.  Fold.  Repeat.  And again.  And once more.

A day spent laboring because I really have no more holidays in my life.

At the end of this day, a female began screaming outside.  I call the non-emergency number of the police department probably more than most folk.  Worried something might not be an emergency and wanting the dispatch officer to decide.  I wasn't sure if I should call, because what a scream is to me is not necessarily the same to others.  And yet one of the deepest wounds of the pit bull attack was that I screamed and screamed and screamed and no one came.  I heard afterwards that the people in the houses thought I was a child playing some game.  It wasn't until a man walking outside saw Amos and I being attacked that folk came and saved us.

Just as I put fingertip to phone, squad cars came rolling up.  One.  Two.  Three.  Four.  Then EMS.  Then an ambulance.  My neighbor was rather distraught over the screaming that went on for over an hour and called me.  Once all the emergency personnel was left, she came over in her nightgown; I was in my pajamas (and GREEN footies).  We sat on the front porch talking for a bit.

Then up walked a very, very, very drunk man, the one who lives in the house where all the screaming took place.  His daughter had had a bad reaction to some synthetic drug.  Clearly, he was already intoxicated before she took something called "spice" (I am sooooooo out of the loop these days), but in his vulnerable state, he was weeping because his eighteen-year-old daughter wouldn't listen to him anymore.  He rambled on and on and on about offering her beer to drink because that was so much better than drugs.

My neighbor, knowing how incredibly anxious I can get, headed him off before he could climb my steps, vulnerable herself in just a nightgown.  I listened to her comfort the insensible about the insensible and thought what a terribly broken world this is.

The daughter's screaming was so confusing and so disturbing.  She sounded in pain and yet not in pain.  Terrified and yet ... almost defiant.  The screaming went on and on and on as the first officers awaited help and then the second set awaited more help.  My neighbor and I talked about how we kept wanted someone to do something, but until personnel arrived with the right medication, nothing was going to change what was happening in the daughter's mind and body.

The father wasn't allowed in the ambulance, which took at least 30 minutes to actually leave, and he was too drunk to drive.  Redirected by my neighbor, he returned to the curb in front of his house, sat down, and wailed for his baby.  Even if someone was willing to drive him, no hospital was going to let a drunk man into a room with a patient.  As sad as the sight was, I found it merciful that the police did not arrest the father for drunk and disorderly conduct, as his grief over the situation was almost as loud and prolonged as his daughter's response to whatever she took.

My block has changed over the last year, with several families with young children moving here.  There is more noise, more running back and forth across yards.  More neighbors spending the evening in someone's back yard, music and laughter filling the evening air.  More folk stopping to trade yard work stories whenever the lawnmowers start up.  It is as if the sound of a lawn being mowed reminds half the street to get out and tend to theirs.  Fort Wayne is fireworks crazy so there was lots and lots and lots of camaraderie at the end of June through the middle of July.  There is a neighborhood race where folk sit on their porches or in chairs on their lawns and cheer the runners.  As I have written before, Amos and I are not the only ones to go sit out on a porch to watch the rain.  And yet, tonight, with those screams, no one ventured outside.  Save for the flashing lights and emergency personnel, the street was seemingly deserted.

I suspect that I am not the only one who wanted to huddle in the corner of a closet listening to those screams.  Three doors down, at the intersection, and yet it seemed and felt as if the screams were just outside my door.

I wanted to pray for the daughter and the father, for all the people living in that house.  But I don't know what that means these days, I don't know what prayer means if you don't know what faith really is, what it means to believe and to trust.  But I wish for them mercy.  And healing.

The other day, I read this ... water-troubling ... article Tacos, Beer, and the Banality of Evil.  The title caught my eye. Reading it made me think of one of Gitte's recent posts, essentially asking how anyone could think of something other than the cruelty perpetrated by Islamic jihadists these days.  Basically, the first article wends around the point that evil has become banal ... boring and ordinary.  Sure, such things grab the headlines for a brief moment, then the media is on to chasing the next story.  And all the horror and violence and graft and deception and lawlessness continues without much notice.

In May, or some time around then, the WHO was quoted in an article as announcing that the ebola outbreak had peaked and was surely on the decline.  I laughed when I read that.  I laughed at its absurdity.  I lived in Liberia.  I knew full well that the "slums" of Monrovia would be a problem.  As would the animists and the mistrust of government and outsiders.  The deep and abiding priority of protecting family first being a significant factor in the ongoing spread of the disease is no surprise.  Whoever made that claim, wasn't thinking about West Africans, their lives and their cultures, the state of healthcare over there.

Now, when the outbreak has become even more rapid than ever before, it is off the news cycle.  Ebola, one of the most feared diseases of all time, has become banal.

I am not sure how to pull together the things I have been musing, but those screams tonight and the dark and quiet street, the dearth of neighbors on the street made me think of that article and Gitte's blog.  One would think such a caterwauling would at least bring out a few, but such primal and disturbing screams appeared to be banal.

Maybe.
Or, as I pondered earlier, maybe they sent us all to hiding, to trying to escape them.

What came to mind is the phrase oft used to explain both action and inaction:  "an abundance of caution."  Maybe this world does need an abundance of caution.  But it also is in dire need of an abundance of mercy.