Racine’s Chamber of Commerce will not be wild about this blog entry (although I’m pretty sure they’re not frequent visitors to my website, so I’m not losing sleep over this) but I need to share this story- even though it paints a less than rosy picture of the city which my wife and I call home. Yesterday afternoon, right before joining my wife and our friends Lynn and Walter for supper at Applebee’s, I swung by Regency Mall (about six blocks from our house) to get my eyeglasses adjusted and buying a shirt to throw on for dinner. (I had gone to Razor Sharp and forgot to bring a spare shirt along – and had worked up WAY too good a sweat to inflict myself in that condition on my dinner companions.) As I left the mall, I noticed a security guard and a young man walking towards me, deep in what looked like a fairly amiable conversation. Then I got to my car and saw a sight which made my blood run cold. . . the automobile parked next to mine had been savagely attacked by a vandal who smashed in his driver’s side window and also bashed a huge dent into the back door on the driver’s side. It was a bit reminiscent of the run-in my Honda had with the Carthage track team in April of last year, but that at least was an accident. This was an attack of some sort and my car was right next to it. In fact, what creeps me out more than anything is to think of how close to my car the perpetrator had to stand as he did this – maybe he even leaned against my car as he steadied himself with his sledgehammer or whatever it is he used to do this damage.
I felt so badly for the victim of this crime – and felt scared and upset to have been so close to the line of fire, so to speak . . . and it certainly brought back nasty memories of the one and only time that I’ve been the target of something like this. I was in graduate school at the time and had driven my Plymouth Duster – “Lester the Duster” I called that beat up old car, which was, in the words of songwriter Nancy Honeytree, “an old tin can with a steering wheel.” I drove to Omaha one weekend to see my former voice teacher sing the role of the mother in Opera Omaha’s production of Hansel and Gretel. I came back to my car to find the driver’s side back window completely smashed out and my stereo speakers which sat on the back seat noticeably missing. It was 25 years ago but I remember those first few moments as though they were yesterday- first I looked at the sight with complete disbelief, almost as though it couldn’t be bad because there was no ominous music in the background. Then it hit me that it was real and it suddenly felt like whatever they had used to smash in the window had been used on my stomach. Never in my life had I suffered that kind of a theft before, and it sure made me feel like I was a long long long long way from home. By the way, because I was squarely in my Poor Student Days, I did not replace the window. . . but instead taped a Domino’s Pizza box in its place and lived with that makeshift patch job for over a year. (And it was in the dead of winter.) At the time it seemed like a workable solution; now I just shake my head in disbelief that I would ever even think to do such a thing. Then again, that’s what you do when something like that befalls you and there simply isn’t money on hand to deal with it properly. I try to remember that when I see someone driving around with a garbage bag taped in place of a missing window. And may God smite me right between the eyes if I think for even a moment “what a loser.”