07:58 – Barbara just left on her trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. She’ll be back Monday. Colin and I will build some science kits, work on the prepping book, and watch Heartland re-runs.
When I walked Colin after dinner yesterday, we stopped to talk with Mary, Kim’s mom. As we were standing there talking, a loud argument erupted between the couple across the street from Mary’s house, something about who’d done what to whose computer. We could hear it through the closed door of their house. Eventually, Zakiah, the wife, came storming out the front door, followed by Bernard, her husband, with both shouting at each other. Then they both went back into their house, and I came home with Colin.
A few minutes after I got home, Mary called and said Bernard was at her house and had asked to use her phone to call the police. Kim was away at a nephew’s ball game, so Mary was by herself. She does very well for someone who’s 83 years old, but even so I could tell she was upset by what was going on. She told me to look out my front door. When I did, I saw four police cars parked in the street in front of her house and that of the bickering neighbors. So I told her I’d be right down.
Apparently, after I’d left the first time, the couple had gotten into a physical fight. Zakiah had stormed off with their four kids and driven away in her minivan. Bernard was injured. I’m not surprised, because Zakiah is a very large woman. She’s over six feet tall, and weighs more than I do. When I walked back down to Mary’s house, Bernard, with his arm in a sling, was standing there talking to three or four cops. I sat there with Mary in her living room until the cops put Bernard in the back of one of the patrol cars and everyone left.
This is not the first time the cops have been called out to that house. In the few months they’ve lived there, the cops have been out at least three times now. Bernard can regularly be heard bellowing at the kids, and a couple of our neighbors have said there were times when they nearly decided to call the police. Barbara says she’s had enough, and that these people don’t belong in this neighborhood. As I said to Mary, when Barbara and I argue, we do so indoors and at a low enough volume not to disturb the neighbors–as presumably does every other couple in the neighborhood–and we never end up with our arms in slings. Fighting in public like that is just infra dig.