A Violation

I discovered it last evening when I was looking for my gym bag so I could go work out. My daily ritual at Gold's has turned into a great stress reliever and I look forward to either lifting those weights or tackling the treadmill with my favorite workout music being pumped into my ears with my handy-dandy portable CD player. (The current favorite is "Relayer" by YES.) And I suppose I should have been tipped off when I noticed an old book bag laying on the floor in the living room that had previously been upstairs, or by the fact that the back door was slightly ajar. I passed it off thinking that Max had gotten into the closed room upstairs and pulled out the bag and the back door has never been super secure. But, when I realized that my gym bag was nowhere to be found I checked the trunk of the car and then ran back into the house, knowing that it HAD to be somewhere in plain sight. I mean, I use it every day!

Then it struck me. I glanced around the room. All of my DVDs were gone. I ran upstairs. My change bucket was gone as were a few pairs of pants (nice ones - they still don't fit, but I had just laundered them in anticipation of being able to fit into them again in a few weeks if I worked real hard.) Someone had rifled through my stuff. My house had been broken into and I had been robbed. I had been burgled.

For those of you to whom this has happened, you know the sequence of feelings: the hot flash of realization, the momentary fear of something un-nameable, the oddly placed anger and frustration, then a flood of paranoia: what else did they get? What personal things did they find, did they take - what personal information did they get? Are there any credit card receipts laying around?

At first, I couldn't find my camera but then realized that it was still on the tripod in the corner. The laptop computer was still there. A favorite pair of boots were still in the middle of the room and a few choice electronic gizmos were still laying around, seemingly untouched.

I went out and announced the situation to my neighbors, all of whom were outside doing chores. No one had seen or heard anything and they all claimed to have been around all day. Together we looked around the house for evidence of the intruder's entry. They had to have gotten in the back door, but to get to it they would have had to climbed the back deck fence. Difficult, but not impossible. And then, there, on the ground, my neighbor found a pager. Right near where it would have fallen had it been dropped by the burglar.

I called the police and within 30 minutes an officer was there. He was courteous and efficient. He took notes, photographed the crime scene and made a list of what had been taken. All told it was about $1000 worth of stuff. The officer then told me that he would fill out a report and it would go on a stack of other cases.

Do I feel any safer? No.

Then it began to rain. And it poured. And the skies roared with thunder, wind and an onslaught of sheets of late summer warmed water. The clouds were deep bluish - greenish grey and it seemed almost night time. I sat on my couch, the empty DVD rack in plain sight, feeling the sticky air around me and listening to the atmospheric battle outside. I was feeling exposed and violated.

At the apex of the storm I found the courage to walk calmly outside, lock the door, walk to the car and drive to the gym. I could barely concentrate on the workout. I was wondering how safe the house was during my absence. No one would try to break in during such a gully-washing of a storm. But, then, I realized that my own sense of reason did not apply to whomever had robbed me. So, I finished quickly and went home.

By then the clouds had finished crying and the sky was becoming lighter and the air, still thick with moisture, was blowing impotently across the debris that had been washed down and deposited in the streets by the deluge. Everything was different. My house was a mess and I felt vulnerable and unhappy and the desire to escape was edging up toward the forefront of my mind.