It’s not a good sign when you open your door and discover three TV news helicopters circling your house.
That’s what’s happening outside as I type this.
I shall avoid answering the door tonight, lest I be confronted with a 60 Minutes camera crew or the bhoys from Homeland Security . . .
Harbingers
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WTF? you seem to get a lot of action for living down a sleepy little lane…
and I’ve got police sirens coming into the neighborhood, someplace nearby but can’t pinpoint where. at least 4 different cars over the last ten minutes or so. is there some sort of crime wave spreading across New Mexico?
parris
No, you really can’t leave us that way. It’s cruel. I demand an update to this post, yes indeedy I do.
According to the news, the RailRunner, our local passenger train, hit a car and killed someone.
They have been talking about the need for more safety gates at crossings, and this may do it.
–Kathy H.
Yes, it looks as if the news choppers were photographing a fatality on the railroad a short distance from here.
Ironically the victim was a retired railroad engineer who tried to scoot his little red car across the tracks ahead of our new commuter train. He’d lived on that road for years and had driven over that crossing hundreds of times.
The Rail Runner travels a lot faster than the local freight trains, and the victim’s mental reflexes might have been out of date.
Well, at least it wasn’t a Homeland Security issue.
Reminds me of a couple of years ago when Zach and I were in Holland. We’d been in Maastricht and were taking a train back to Amsterdam, where we had dinner plans with friends. We’d allowed enough time to get off at ‘s-Hertogenbosch and have a stroll around the old town in honor of Hieronymus Bosch, whose birthplace it was, then catch a later train to Amsterdam. But well shy of ‘Bosch the train stopped dead on the tracks, between stations.
Time passed. Then several police cars rushed past, followed by an ambulance. The Dutch passengers around us nodded sagely and uttered some version of, “Oh, of course.” Then they explained to us that the delay had been caused by a suicide–someone jumping in front of the train. They added that the train wouldn’t move until a firetruck had come alongside to wash the blood off the front of the engine. Sure enough, a bit later a firetruck came by, and a while after that we were once again under way–too late, alas, for that stop in ‘Bosch, which will have to wait for another time.
Our informative train mates also told us that jumping in front of trains is a top form of suicide in Holland, because there are very few places high enough to jump to one’s death from, and because the Dutch instinctively recoil from the idea of drowning themselves. Perhaps here they were gently funnin’ with the foreigners, but who knows?
Back about five or six years ago, before Hilde’s mother Edna died, I got a call from Edna at her assisted living home, complaining that she was bored.
She was bored because the policemen wouldn’t let her leave her room. And those damn helicopters overhead were noisy!
I turned on the tv to see an aerial shot of the assisted living home. Turned out a deranged woman had led police on a high-speed chase across town, ending at the home, where she’d abandoned the care and run into the home’s dining room, where she’d waved a gun around and threatened to shoot someone. Police responded with two shots, killing her (and, unfortunately, the mid-term fetus she was pregnant with). So all the residents were kept in their rooms until the crime scene could be run and the body removed.
And my mother-in-law was bored.
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