COPS comes to bend

I had no idea when I wrote my spoof travel advisory about traveling to Oregon (danger in the woods) that crime would come knocking at our door.

Literally.  And not in the way that Joe Biden uses it.  Really literally.

Mom and I were sitting in the back yard last night waiting for Super Moon to makes it appearance.  The show was delayed slightly by a small thunderstorm hogging its entrance.

I was telling her a funny story about Abby's Pizza, when I heard a loud pounding at the front door.  Then a second pounding.  I told her that someone was at the door.  There was something very odd about the knocking, so I stood a few feet back while Mom opened the door.

When she did, a man wearing a white cloth mask burst in and yelled: "Stand back.  Stand back." while pushing her with his right forearm.

I suspect he then saw me.  At least, he ran out the door slamming it behind him.  By the time I got outside, I saw someone who looked similar running between two houses in the neighborhood.

The two of us spent a couple of hours talking to a team of police officers.  There must have been five or six police cars parked in front of the house.  Including a police dog.

And, was the criminal identified by dusting the knob on the front door for fingerprints?  Did the police grab the perpetrator by using clever television-inspired interrogation techniques?  Has he been convicted and sent off to Devil's Island for life?

Of course not.  This is real life.  Not television.  I suspect this house invasion will go into the long list of unsolved crimes that plagues every jurisdiction.

Whoever the criminal was, he knew what he was doing.  Mask to hide his face.  A towel wrapped around his arm as a bar against defensive wounds.  A loud commanding voice.  And, obviously, a carefully-chosen victim: elderly, hard of hearing, living alone.

A rather well-planned robbery.  Because it went far past burglary with the threat in Mom's presence.  This is a great example for people who regularly call burglaries "robberies."  This actually was a robbery. 

You are all asking: "How is your Mother?"  You need to know something about the woman who bore me.  She is one of he coolest cucumbers in God's salad.

She related her version of the facts to the police officers with far more aplomb than I did.  My voice was easily a half -- if not a full -- octave higher than usual.

As I write this, Darrel has come over to join us in our recounting of our family brush with the American criminal system.  Well, at least, the criminal and the police part of that system.

And that is all the editorializing I am doing tonight.

Oh.  I almost forgot.  Here is my shot of the Super Moon.  A tad hazy as a result of the cloud cover.  A bit late.  At midnight.  But better late than never.