Citizen Jake

My mom lives in one of the safest/richest suburbs in the country. Crime is really low, as in almost nonexistent, maybe an egging every once and a while. Having said that, she's obsessed (my word, not hers) with going all out to prevent even the remotest chance of anything happening, so she insists on silly things like "locking doors" and "closing the garage door". Dumb things like that which are more then likely leftover from a time when we did not live in a great neighborhood and our bikes would get stolen and windows broken, etc..

As someone who's been on this planet for 24 whole years (Jesus) I have grown accustomed to closing front doors and locking them when I leave the house, like most normal people. I also make sure the garage door closes behind me when I'm entering or exiting. While my mom's paranoia can be irritating, I understand the general idea and since its really not that hard to make her happy in this regard, I try to acquiesce to her wishes. My sister, Turtle, takes the opposite approach. She almost never locks the door, both when she's at home and when she leaves. When she's at home she routinely leaves the door wide open while she sleeps/eats on the couch in the basement. She's been known to leave the garage door open as well. And that's where our story begins.

On Saturday morning my mom went to take our beagle Amber out for a walk, as she is want to do. As my mom headed down the street she noticed that our garage door was wide open, as it apparently had been all night. Further, as my mom looked around, she saw a strange man standing on our neighbor's lawn, holding one of my snowboarding bags which he had clearly decided to help himself to with the aid of an open garage door. My mom, being a woman of action, called out to the man and told him to drop my bag, a directive he ignored; instead choosing to bolt with my poor bag.

Now what follows may not be the funniest thing I could ever imagine but it would certainly fall into my Top 10 list: Seeing this man take off with my stolen property must have stirred some animal instinct inside my mom because, perhaps against her better judgement, she took off after the guy, with Amber running along with her. Again, I suppose its possible in theory to come up with a funnier scene then a middle-aged (to be charitable) woman who more then likely was wearing sweat pants tucked INSIDE her socks (I don't know for a fact she was wearing this but I'd be willing to bet a large amount of money this was the case) and an overweight, arthritic beagle chasing after some poor bastard as he tried to steal my snowboarding boots but I'd be hard-pressed to do so.

At some point early in the chase the guy decides he can't make a quick enough getaway while carrying my bag with him, so he ditches it. Far be it for me to judge someone else's level of fitness after the exhaustion I felt after my high school alumni soccer game but if this guy couldn't out run my mom and Amber, well he must be in dire need of some sort of work out regiment. I mean come on now. I know for a fact that Amber can barely get above a some what brisk jog and my mom isn't exactly Marion Jones. So this guy must have been either really slow or really old, possibly even crippled, if he felt there was a chance of being caught by his two pursuers. But he dropped my bag and my mom (and Amber) decided that was enough to give up the chase, having proven their point and protected their home.

After recovering the bag (as an aside, this is a little disappointing because those boots didn't really fit me that well and I was looking for a reason to replace them, oh well) my mom marched back to the house where she awoke my passed out sleeping sister and told her of the morning's developments. Turtle admitted to perhaps forgetting to close the garage door the previous night, though she insisted this was not the result of alcohol consumption (right). And now, whenever anyone complains about having to deadbolt the door and prop a chair under the handle, my mom will be able to point to this story as an example of the harsh realities that suburbanites must face everyday and continue to nag us to lock up the house on the one in a million chance someone would try and rob us (again).

Epilogue: Shortly after the above incident my mom was driving some where and she passed the bus stop near our house. Sitting there, waiting for a bus, was the man who tried to rob us. Perhaps in pity mom did nothing, just let the poor guy wait for his bus home. It is quite possible that we were robbed, or almost robbed, by the worst criminal in America, a fact for which our family is most thankful.