kip_w (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} kip_w) wrote,@ 2008-04-25 00:00:00 |
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originally posted as a comment elsewhere
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27 years ago, Cathy and I lived in Statesboro, Georgia, below the gnat line, about 50 humid miles inland from Savannah. We didn't have much money. One day, at a garage sale, I saw a sweet little yellow chainsaw for just $10. Ten Bucks! She didn't let me buy it.
Five or six years later, we were doing better, and living in a nice apartment in Newport News. One night, some yoyos were honking their horn outside the less-nice apartments next door. After putting up with it for a while, I went outside and, using my words, indicated that they should go in and see why nobody was coming out, and that people were trying to have their lives. They seemed surprised by these revelations, but they weren't hostile to them. I turned to go back in, and the guy in the apartment in front of me -- a nephew of Frank Lloyd Wright, he once told me -- said I was pretty brave to go out there like that with nothing in my hand. He cleared up my brief mystification by showing me what he meant: there was a large pistol in the back of his jogging shorts. My recollection of what happened next is a little fuzzy, but some of our other neighbors were standing around by then, and I got the impression that some of them also may have had something ready to go in their hands. I drifted back into our apartment and told Cathy what I'd just seen.
It was then that I realized I had missed out on what might have been the best argument for buying that chainsaw -- the chainsaw I still think about sometimes. A man's gotta be able to defend his home.
And I am pretty sure that any burglar, hearing the sound of a chainsaw being started up in the next room, would simply leave my home with no additional fuss.
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27 years ago, Cathy and I lived in Statesboro, Georgia, below the gnat line, about 50 humid miles inland from Savannah. We didn't have much money. One day, at a garage sale, I saw a sweet little yellow chainsaw for just $10. Ten Bucks! She didn't let me buy it.
Five or six years later, we were doing better, and living in a nice apartment in Newport News. One night, some yoyos were honking their horn outside the less-nice apartments next door. After putting up with it for a while, I went outside and, using my words, indicated that they should go in and see why nobody was coming out, and that people were trying to have their lives. They seemed surprised by these revelations, but they weren't hostile to them. I turned to go back in, and the guy in the apartment in front of me -- a nephew of Frank Lloyd Wright, he once told me -- said I was pretty brave to go out there like that with nothing in my hand. He cleared up my brief mystification by showing me what he meant: there was a large pistol in the back of his jogging shorts. My recollection of what happened next is a little fuzzy, but some of our other neighbors were standing around by then, and I got the impression that some of them also may have had something ready to go in their hands. I drifted back into our apartment and told Cathy what I'd just seen.
It was then that I realized I had missed out on what might have been the best argument for buying that chainsaw -- the chainsaw I still think about sometimes. A man's gotta be able to defend his home.
And I am pretty sure that any burglar, hearing the sound of a chainsaw being started up in the next room, would simply leave my home with no additional fuss.
.
