LETTERS FROM HOME: LEARNING SOME OF THE TRICKS OF LIVING ON LAWLESS AVENUE

Nov. 2, 2000

Dear Ken,

Trick or treaters were scarce on our street Halloween night. You figure parents kept their children away since the killing in the park next door. Or maybe drinkers at the picnic table next to the sidewalk in the park discouraged family outings. Yeah, let's walk past them. That'll be scary.

DC had readied for the night with a jack-o'-lantern on the porch and bags of potato chips and Rice Krispies treats, her vain notion of a healthy alternative to candy. No one came to the door. Someone finally knocked after she went to bed, too late to save Halloween.

Sometime after midnight I called the police because the neighbors across the street were at it again. Their loud, profane, drunken arguments on the front porches sound as if they could erupt into a fist fight or worse.

But I know how it works. When the police arrive everybody becomes Harpo Marx. When the police leave, the Three Stooges in reappear dark, dark moods.

Here I am, Mr. Live and Let Live, calling the police because the situation seems not annoying but disturbingly chaotic, as if we live in an alternate Cape Girardeau where the usual societal rules are allowed to be bent, bruised and broken.

DC and I are trying to figure out an answer to living here on lawless avenue.

I tried to phone the neighbors' landlady. She's unlisted.

I phoned the police chief to ask what became of the popular officers who once patrolled our neighborhood on bicycles. The community policing grant expired, he explained, and the two remaining officers are kept busy working with school programs, nuisance abatement and neighborhood watch programs.

The bicycle patrols did such a good job that the police started concentrating on other needs and other areas. I can't argue that there are other needs. I can argue that the bicycle patrols made all the difference in our neighborhood.

Violence manifests itself in many ways that fall short of murder but are still violent. A gesture, a word, a lack of consideration, an indifference to others wound, not physically but psychically. We have all felt those wounds and we have all inflicted them.

DC and I are angry that violence in all these forms is being visited upon our streets.

Countless times every day, each of us chooses to react with violence or with love and peace.

We don't always choose well. The trick is to keep trying.

Love, Sam