Adventures in Urban Parenting #2
I have kindly refrained from giving you the sleep updates lately-- partially because any time I write something up here, everything backfires and the whole routine gets thrown off. Regardless, things have gotten back on track after the disruption of the travel to Iowa, and Ben is back to sleeping well at night. This week Steve and I were just getting a bit more sleep ourselves when we woke up at 1 AM due to the extremely loud car radio playing in front of our house. After 15 minutes, we realized this wasn't simply a person parking loudly, but someone who had camped in front of our house and was sitting in their car.
We walked down the stairs and peered out. We couldn't tell if it was a woman or a man in the car, and since the light was on and it was clear that the person wasn't planning on moving, we decided not to confront them but just to call the police. While on the phone with the police, our next-door-neighbor Sharee, wearing her nighttime sweats, walked out of her house and asked politely if the person would mind turning down the radio. Well, it turns out it was a woman in the car, and it turns out she did mind.
Which she made very clear, very loudly, with many colorful curse words which I will not repeat here. But the gist of her rant as she got out of the car to yell at us was this (and I'd type it all in caps to get across the sense of just how loud and obnoxious she was, but that would just be loud and obnoxious to read): "I can't get a parking spot in front of my house and I get a ticket every day and I've lived her all my life and my parents are both lawyers and my father is a professor at Howard and I've lived here all my life but I can't park in front of my own house, so you can all suffer. All you renters. I own my house. And I can't park in front of it and I get tickets all the time and so go ahead and call the police because I'm sitting here and you can all suffer and my parents are lawyers and my father is a professor at Howard and I get a ticket every day. . ." Repeat ad infinitum. . . or at least until the police came.
The police were there within two minutes, which was gratifying. We had five cars with their lights blinking parked in front of our house. I peered out between the blinds of our second floor window feeling like the neighborhood gossip and reported the action to Steve. He had gotten back into bed, but he didn't really need me to report since the woman was so loud he could hear everything. Which was all the same things she'd said to us with fewer "Suck my #$(*&%(*&" exclamations thrown in.
The police officers said things like: "Stop yelling" and "Have you been drinking?" and "No, I don't want to see all the tickets you've gotten" and "Can you hear how crazy you sound?" and "So your father is a cop and a lawyer and a professor at Howard? Pick one." and "Well, it's good that your mother is a lawyer so you won't have to pay for one."
That last comment was delivered after she failed to walk a straight line and they arrested her for DUI. All told it took 5 cop cars, 45 minutes, and an amazing amount of noise.
And, most importantly, I'm very happy to say that the Bug slept through it all.
We walked down the stairs and peered out. We couldn't tell if it was a woman or a man in the car, and since the light was on and it was clear that the person wasn't planning on moving, we decided not to confront them but just to call the police. While on the phone with the police, our next-door-neighbor Sharee, wearing her nighttime sweats, walked out of her house and asked politely if the person would mind turning down the radio. Well, it turns out it was a woman in the car, and it turns out she did mind.
Which she made very clear, very loudly, with many colorful curse words which I will not repeat here. But the gist of her rant as she got out of the car to yell at us was this (and I'd type it all in caps to get across the sense of just how loud and obnoxious she was, but that would just be loud and obnoxious to read): "I can't get a parking spot in front of my house and I get a ticket every day and I've lived her all my life and my parents are both lawyers and my father is a professor at Howard and I've lived here all my life but I can't park in front of my own house, so you can all suffer. All you renters. I own my house. And I can't park in front of it and I get tickets all the time and so go ahead and call the police because I'm sitting here and you can all suffer and my parents are lawyers and my father is a professor at Howard and I get a ticket every day. . ." Repeat ad infinitum. . . or at least until the police came.
The police were there within two minutes, which was gratifying. We had five cars with their lights blinking parked in front of our house. I peered out between the blinds of our second floor window feeling like the neighborhood gossip and reported the action to Steve. He had gotten back into bed, but he didn't really need me to report since the woman was so loud he could hear everything. Which was all the same things she'd said to us with fewer "Suck my #$(*&%(*&" exclamations thrown in.
The police officers said things like: "Stop yelling" and "Have you been drinking?" and "No, I don't want to see all the tickets you've gotten" and "Can you hear how crazy you sound?" and "So your father is a cop and a lawyer and a professor at Howard? Pick one." and "Well, it's good that your mother is a lawyer so you won't have to pay for one."
That last comment was delivered after she failed to walk a straight line and they arrested her for DUI. All told it took 5 cop cars, 45 minutes, and an amazing amount of noise.
And, most importantly, I'm very happy to say that the Bug slept through it all.
Labels: adventures in urban parenting
posted by Karen | 11:01 PM
1 Comments:
But the most offensive thing was that she called us "g-d-m Mormons"!
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