Straying from the line in Normal entries

The weird thing about napping during the day is that I dream. I dreamt about an event I had pretty much forgotten. No weird dream shit added, more like a memory reborn as a dream. I don’t want to tell the story as heroic, it’s not heroic, but I am one of the three people in it who do something either brave or stupid. If one of the others had carried through what I did would have been stupid.

I had inherited this new caseload and among the cases was this juvenile delinquent who had skipped the institution and been at large for over a year. For the millioneth time, I was not the type of social worker one thinks of when one thinks of social workers. I found, had her in county juvy lock-up pending the formality of a magistrate revoking parole. My boss came with me to hearing. She used to be a cop, the first female cop in the not so sleepy hamlet a few hours south of Portland. She missed criminal related cases. Hmmm, she missed hearings based on adjudicating criminal charges as opposed to civil ones.

The lobby of courthouse was crowded. A hoopdee pulled up on the steps. A big kid came running thyrough the door knocking people over to make a corridor. My new case elbowed the boss, knocking her down, and ran for the door through the opening. A friend of mine who worked for the county and I ran after her. He tacjled her at the door, my momentum carried me through the door.

The hoopdee driver was an ex-delinquent of mine from my days in juvy justice. He stood there pointing a piece waiting for his girlfriend to make it out the door. I said something calm and commanding that gave him a way out, something like “Go Home T___” For a moment there was just sunshine and shadows and the wheezing of the hoopdee engine. He got in the car and left.

When I woke from my nap I had an idea of writing it as fiction. It was drafted in my head as third person sympathetic to the males kids POV, but third person anyhow. Third person is like the voice of God. We like to think of god as being sympathetic to the protagonist who is always us. There isn’t enough me in the story for me to be the protagonist. I suppose the story could have been me as the narrator. Doesn’t matter, I let it go. I had let it go a long time ago when it happened.

The boss told the story back at the office where I was treated like a hero. At most I was a little angry. That girl shouldn’t have been at large for a year as if she wasn’t fucked up enough, getting involved with that other kid was bad bad bad. Had he been adjudicated as an adult he would have gotten life for the event that landed him in my little jail in the first place.

There was this one guy at the office who said something during the hero talk, something like “If it was me I would have taken the armed kid out.” Again, unspoken anger from me and he was smart enough to shut up as I came to his desk. Because of his job I could give him work orders, I asked him to pick up these babies for a visit with their nightmare parents. If I thought he really would have done the sort of things he boasted about I would have kept him from any of my cases. The presumption that he would have made the fifteen yards down the steps without getting shot was … deluded. Not to mention the crowd on the other side of the glass doors.

In anything involving human affairs if you have the opportunity to direct the event, always, always, always give a person a way out. Without a way out there is nothing to lose, everything is hopeless. Give a way out to everyone, always. In affairs of the heart give as many ways out as possible. There is a stupid piece of conventional wisdom that goes something like; If you love something let it go, if it comes back it likes you too, if not it was never yours. What’s stupid about it is everything except it was never yours, the idea that you even have a choice in letting go or not. Because of that saying I’ll amend always leave a way out to always leave a free way out with an open hand. Otherwise that other not so stupid old saw kicks in; The Road the hell is paved with good intentions. Though I submit not “letting” someone or something go has no good intention.

Love is not a good intention. It’s a core value or it’s a twisted smothering blanket. An intention is something you mean to do, an outcome you hope for by taking certain actions. That would have been the point of the short story or flash I didn’t write. Driving your hoopdee up the court-house steps to shoot her way out for her is one thing. Being confronted with a choice and ultimately what next and the nature of love, that’s another thing entirely. It didn’t take much, just the option of leaving pointed up in simple and direct terms.

Again, it’s not something I think about often, so much so that, apparently, it’s not one of those stories I’ll never tell. For what it’s worth the guy got picked up a few nights later at a crack house. There’s a lot of good reasons why cops don’t raid crack houses often. This one got raided because the guy was in it. Out the back door went most of the regular patrons. The guy wasn’t a crack head, he was holed up in the house because there are a lot of good reasons why cops don’t raid crack houses. Among those reasons are even a few Joe Citizen, a composite that likes to bitch, would accept, like, say, there is no protecting or serving involved in a crack house raid or that raiding a house just moves the business, perhaps moves it to joe citizens neighbors house.

Ok, that’s all there is, maybe even more than all there is. I was on the phone for a bit so if there was a loose thread I lost it, but I think that’s it.