Terror in the Burbs!
As of late, there have been a string of small burgleries plaguing the Berbs. The message is that no safe haven is safe no more. A neighbor of my parents had their house broken into while the couple slept peacefully upstairs with their Bichon (apparently not very effective watch dog). Then Meredith was similarly vandalized, when thieves stole six hundred dollars in cash and a twelve-hundred dollar watch from her kitchen table. Several days before the burglery, Meredith's doorbell rang in the middle of the night. She thinks she was targeted to see who would open the door in the middle of the night without a baseball bat.
So you can imagine how i was moderately anxious at 11:30pm last night when our phone startled us from our sleep. We didn't manage to get to the receiver in time, and no messages on our cell phones made me even more nervous. Who would call our home at this hour, and not our cells? I went downstairs, i turned on all the lights. I sat in the light for a little bit and pondered being targeted by Bedford High School hoodlums. Then I turned off the lights and went upstairs. Through the window i could hear sounds of stirrings. Was it rustling in the bushes, or just the wind? At 11:45 a strange car pulled up accross the street, and i turned on all the lights and stared out the window. At midnight a car alarm went off somewhere in the neighborhood. My ears felt like pointy perked pyramids. I didn't shut my eyes until 1:30am.
This was a bad time to shut my eyes, it turned out, because that's just about what time Ashley was getting home, drunk with beer and hogies. She scuttled-dash-shuffled off to bed, and i was wide awake again. Every small noise perked my ears towards the outside world, dark and scary. At 4am i finally did drift off to sleep, but the alarm went off at 5:30, and i was not a happy camper heading to work this morning.
"Too bad my bat-ass crazy anxiety keeps me from sleeping" i told myself in the car ride to work. Then my cell-phone rang.
"[Our neighbor] Tracy came over after you left," Dan said. "Her car was broken into last night, and also Mike's, and also three other people on the block."
"Wow. But they didn't take anything from us?"
"No. Must have been all the turning on and off of the lights that you did."
"Did you tell Tracy that i was up all anxious about noises? That i had a premonition?"
"No, i told her that you're always psychotically suspicious, but this time you just happened to be right."