bearing blog

Bad-cop story of the day.

I would  so sue if this was my kid.

The 13-year-old son of John and Tara Farrell and a 12-year-old friend were walking in Brooklyn Park one August night when a Cadillac Escalade sped up and the driver ordered them inside.

The man drove to his nearby house, sat the frightened boys on a curb and slapped handcuffs on them. Only then did they learn that they had been placed under citizen's arrest by off-duty Minneapolis police officer Tony Adams, whose doorbell had been rung earlier by someone who fled and who had heard from neighbors that teens might be breaking into vehicles in the area.

The Farrells, who had called 911 about their missing son and had been frantically searching for him, didn't learn the identity of the man they believed had abducted the boys for at least 10 minutes.

Adams'  lawyer says he was only doing "what any cop would have done."  On behalf of everyone in Minneapolis:  Let's hope not. 

Several people witnessed the "arrest," and called 911 to report what looked every bit like a kidnapping to them.

"On death as a blessing" --- and as a model.

"Dad?  Mom?  Does God love the people in Hell?"  

That's Milo, always with the theology questions at bedtime.  It would be easy to say "You're supposed to be in bed; go back upstairs."  

"Hmm.  We don't know for sure if there are any people in Hell.  But if there are people in Hell, then God must love them, since He loves every person."

"Then why are they still there?"  

There's nothing child-ish about children's theological thinking -- haven't the greatest minds among us been grappling with this stuff for two thousand years and more?   What good is this omnipotent omnibenevolence stuff anyway, if it can't or won't stop suffering, temporal or eternal?

"That's an answer nobody's sure about,"  I said.  "We know God's mercy lasts forever, but we also know that people might choose not to want His mercy.  Some people say that this must mean, either that any people in Hell must stay there because they really want to stay there, or else, because God knows that it is really the place where those people will be the most happy -- that because of their choices they would not really be happier anywhere else."

That was a couple of nights ago.  I thought of that conversation again this morning when I picked up the Office of Readings while I waited for the bread machine to make bagel dough for me.  The second reading was from "A treatise on death as a blessing by Saint Ambrose, bishop."  He writes about dying to self (this translation is from my dead-tree breviary, not the link):

Death must be active within us if life also is to be active within us... [The Apostle] therefore teaches us to seek out this kind of death even in this life, so that the death of Christ may shine forth in our lives---that blessed death by which our outward self is destroyed and our inmost self renewed, and our earthly dwelling crumbles away and a home in heaven opens before us.  

The person who cuts himself off from this fallen nature of ours and frees himself from his chains is imitating death...

The Lord allowed death to enter this world so that sin might come to an end.

I thought about that conversation with Milo, how some theologians suppose that Hell exists to provide a place of the most mercy possible for those who in the end don't want Heaven -- a concept that, though it's borne of logical argument from the premises that Hell and a merciful God both exist, probably seems odd to a child (why would you not want Heaven?  and also, can it really be so that Hell can be something merciful?)  Such an idea can only make sense given the terrible flaws in human nature, flaws that we can choose to cling to.

Physical suffering and death in this life often gets the same question, of course, and the good bishop Ambrose's comment got me thinking about the mechanism by which physical death could be a similar mercy in this life.   I've thought of it one way for a long time:  It's a sorrow because it's necessary even for the best of people only because of sin; it's a mercy because it does bring sin and sorrow to an end, at least in the here and now.  

But it had escaped me till now that, since our nature is so flawed as it is, we must learn to cast off those flaws and cut away that diseased part of the self.  To understand how to do this, maybe we needed something in nature to imitate, to understand -- something to which the analogy could be made.  So many of the truths of our faith have been taught to us through concrete imagery -- sowing and reaping, eating and washing, begetting and birthing.  The reality precedes the concrete:  "fatherhood" is what it is so that we could understand something about "God the Father," i.e., natural "fatherhood" was modeled somehow after what we call the Fatherhood in the Blessed Trinity.  

So perhaps natural death was created as a model for us to follow, itself after the process of cutting away the sinful part of ourselves, what we are told we must do with the help of Christ.  Perhaps death is what it is because of mercy, because it shows us something like what we have to go through during our physical lives, in order to come out the other side more alive than before.

Carbonized beet greens.

Set the microwave on fire this evening, exploding a perfectly good glass casserole dish and completely carbonizing the beet greens I was steaming inside it.

 

When your 3-year-old says "Fire?" from the kitchen, take my advice:  Check on it.  Like, don't wait to finish sweeping the dustpile into the dustpan.  Just go look.

Also don't go "Aack!" and open the door right away.  Even though the flames self-extinguished when I did it, you might not be so lucky.  In retrospect that was a very dumb thing to do.

OK, so I microwaved the beet greens a little long, but I didn't think it was THAT long.  5 minutes tops, for about a cup of chopped fresh greens and a little water.  Now they're charcoal.

A couple of cell phone pictures from my neighborhood.

A couple of doors down from my house and across the street. 

This is at the north end of our alley -- I had never noticed how enormous this tree is.  There is a garage under this tree.  It used to be in the same back yard with the tree.  The tree pushed the entire garage into the center of the alley and crushed it.   Along with the power lines running to my house.    Word on the street is that when the top of that tree landed on the house at the right, the homeowner was in the crushed room, which he used as a home office; but that he escaped unhurt.  Apparently there have been no reported injuries.  Remarkable, considering how little warning people had, and how little time to take cover.

Power was back on, it seems, by 11 p.m., with new poles running lines down the alley (although the tree and the crushed garage are still blocking the end of the alley).  I must say, the city crews and Xcel Energy did a damn fine job restoring power quickly.  In the ten years I have lived here, Minneapolis has impressed me with its response to severe weather in general.

Public service announcement.

Let me share with you something that I always sort of knew but truly learned only yesterday:

If a tornado strikes your neighborhood, there is a good chance there will be no "warning." 

No siren, no announcement on TV of a sighting in some nearby county.  One minute everything's normal, the next -- tornado.

I grew up in Ohio, a place that is at least as tornado-prone as Minnesota where I live now.  The Tornado Drill was a basic fact of my elementary-school education.  The sirens went off, we lined up and filed into the windowless, concrete-block hallway where we sat against the wall with our knees up and covered our heads with our arms. 

We didn't drill at home, but the TV was always on, and once or twice a year there was Tornado Warning In Our County.  We turned the volume up loud on the TV so we could hear it from the basement, where we sat under the stairs until the appointed time to emerge.

None of these, however, prepared me for yesterday's event.  You want to know what prepared me for yesterday's tornado touchdown in South Minneapolis?  Home videos of tornadoes.

Because it went like this.  It was raining, but not thundering -- indeed, the boys had been playing in the rain in the back yard for the hour after lunch.  I was teaching Milo math, Mary Jane was watching Signing Time, Oscar was at the kitchen table working.  The lights flickered and went out, which was a good thing because it got our attention -- we looked up, and the kids started to exclaim excitedly and wonder if it was a Really Bad Storm.  About forty-five seconds later the wind kicked up.  I went to close the window and saw --

You know in home videos of tornadoes how there's always, not in the funnel cloud but in front of the silly cameraman whose wife can be heard begging him to turn that damn thing off and get in the basement,  a bunch of random swirling debris? 

Well, I saw stuff like big branches and shingles and jagged pieces of wood in the air, flying over the roof of the house across the street.    I think there may have been an instant of calculation -- Have I ever seen a normal wind blow stuff higher than that house over there?   No?  Well, okay then -- and I yelled for the kids to run to the basement, and they obeyed immediately (thanks for going off, power!)  but by the time we actually all got down there under the stairs, it was over.  We really did not "make it down in time."  But our house was not damaged, so it turned out that we had all the time there was.

Even as I was herding the children into the basement, part of my mind was going, "Don't be silly!  There can't be a tornado because there wasn't a warning!  Or a siren!"  This is the one problem with drills, with warnings and sirens.  They lull you into thinking there will probably be a warning or a siren.

Of course there was a warning after that, and a siren.  Where do you think the warnings come from?  Somebody has to see a tornado and report it.  That "somebody" didn't hear a siren first, he saw the tornado.  Yesterday those first reports were from my neighbors.

Will upload some pictures later.  Meanwhile, here is the Strib article.  And here is a very good article by a local meteorologist underscoring the importance of not waiting for warnings and taking responsibility for your own safety:

 The Minneapolis tornado is making a lot of people very, very uncomfortable. It's one thing if a tornado forms over fields with little/no warning, but within 1 mile of the MSP International Airport and 1-2 miles from downtown Minneapolis? That's an entirely different scenario, the definition of an "OH CRAP" moment. No watches or warnings were in effect at the time of the apparent touchdown. To the best of my knowledge no local TV station was on the air warning of dangerous conditions bearing down on the Minneapolis skyline. Worst case? No, the IDS would not have tipped over. But outer glass walls could have been stripped, shattered - raining deadly debris on pedestrians below, severing the Skyway system, turning cars (and buses) on the Nicollet Mall into projectiles. ...

It's sobering to hear, but it's the truth: to some degree all of us are on our own. We are responsible for our own safety. If you see the cloud base rotating and lowering to the ground, in front of your eyes (accompanied by your ears popping and a growing roar, like thunder that won't go away) do yourself, and future generations, a big favor and get your butt to a safe spot, preferably below ground, below grade. Remember, the threat isn't being lofted into the sky like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. It's standing up and being hit on the head by a tiny pebble traveling at 150 mph. Blunt head trauma. Flying debris. That's how most people become tornado victims. In light of yesterday's scare vow to maintain control over situational awareness, rely on your own wits (in addition to the NWS and local media) and realize that, in the end, YOU are responsible for keeping yourself out of trouble.

Oh, and a father-and-daughter pair who happen both to be  meteorologists happened to have a video camera and recorded it from a hotel room.  Here ya go.

Nightmare.

I've read Amy Welborn's blog daily for years now.  Last night I clicked on her blog just before bed to read the sad news of her 50-year-old husband Michael Dubruiel's collapse and death yesterday morning.

Truly we don't know the day or the hour, and it is all too easy for those of us who, like Amy, are raising small children, to imagine ourselves left to do it as widow or widower. 

 Comments on her blog are closed but thoughts and prayers are being gathered here for her.

Altercation, again.

Around 1:30 in the morning the sound of scuffling and yelling filtered through my consciousness.  I raised my head from the pillow in the darkness, confused -- was that the kids?  No -- the neighbors?  -- didn't sound like them -- ugh.  Again.

It's hard to get the muscles moving when you're wrenched out of sleep.  I wriggled out from between my sleeping husband and sleeping daughter and groped my way to the bedroom window that overlooks the street.  Peeping through the curtains, I couldn't see much, but the yelling was so loud -- obscenities, get your hands off me you %@#$, and thumping noises -- that at first I thought the fight was on our own front porch.  

I moved quickly to the bathroom to see through the other window, then back, and then finally as the last fog of sleepy confusion lifted, I saw the two people, a man and a woman, at each other's throats and screaming at each other, in the open door on the far side of an unfamiliar pickup truck parked directly across the street.  The woman's words were easy to make out, the man's just a low-register snarl.  A third person sat in the driver's seat with his door closed and his window open; all I saw of him was a tiny orange glow that went up and down, perhaps the tip of a lit cigarette, perhaps a cell phone display.

The screaming continued, first the man's voice, then the woman's, and they were hitting each other.

"What is it?" said Mark, already reaching for his phone.

"Pickup truck... three people... one's a woman I think... okay, assault is definitely happening now," I said, still moving back and forth between the bedroom and the bathroom as Mark dialed 911.

Again.  

Hmm, how many times have we called 911 since we moved onto our street in south Minneapolis?  More than I can accurately estimate.  Two dozen times?  More?  Maybe.  We've been here six years or so.   

We do not call for loud parties -- hey, I am always pleased when the sound of loud voices outside is made by people who are celebrating, not angry.  We do not call for car alarms; they stop on their own eventually.   We call when people are fighting, or unconscious, or rolling in the street wailing that they've been raped, or throwing up on our lawn.  Or yelling angry words and running down the street with a handgun drawn, which, despite my unreserved support for a liberal interpretation of the Second Amendment, I personally classify as "suspicious behavior."

Mark described the goings-on in a brief call to the 911 dispatcher as the fighting grew louder, the woman's voice higher-pitched, the sounds of impact against the truck more frequent.  Mark went into the bathroom, where it is darker and he would not be back-lit, to watch.  "Do you have to stand there?  The cops are coming, there's no reason to stand there," I told him.  

"If something happens, I'll be a witness.  Look, I know there's a risk."

I scooped sleeping Mary Jane from our bed and carried her away from the windows, away from the front wall, into the hallway, something I've done before.  Tyesha Edwards is never far from my mind at times like this.  She wrapped her arms around my neck, turned her face into my neck away from the light, and went back to sleep.  It seemed longer than usual before the bright blue lights moved slowly across the ceiling and the yelling stopped.

The woman's voice we could hear, friendly, instantly cheerful and calm where before it had been all obscenities and full-throated hoarse screaming.  It is absolutely amazing, the change in their tone of voice when the police show up.  We have seen this happen before.  "No, nothing's wrong officer.  No, I'm fine."  

If there had just been two of them, the one woman and the one man, I might guess we were looking at a so-called domestic dispute, even though it was taking place on my street in a vehicle I'd never seen before.  What's more likely, given the presence of a third man?  Drugs?  Some kind of prostitution thing gone awry?  (The police liaison told our block club that in our area, prostitution is more significant than drugs or other gang activity.  Used condoms show up from time to time by my garage door.  Our neighbor in the back told us he was offered "services" last year, from a woman walking down the alley as he crossed the yard from his house to his garage.)

The cop ran the license, I guess nothing serious came up, because they all drove away.  We went back to bed.

It takes me a long time to get to sleep after this kind of thing.  You'd think I'd be more used to it by now.

More than 500 American school teachers per year...

...are disciplined for sexual misconduct.  Granted, schoolteachers are a pretty large pool of people. 

Still:  Yech.  h/t Rich, who adds:  "If only government school teachers could marry.  If only women could be government school teachers."

That makes me wonder how the breakdown falls between male and female schoolteachers.  There are vastly more women than men teaching primary and secondary school in the U. S.  Are the genders proportionately represented among the teachers who are also sex offenders?

We are safe.

A bridge I drive across several times a day has collapsed into the Mississippi River.  Mark usually drives across it to get home, but has been taking a detour to avoid construction delays lately.  I don't know whether he drove across it today (he left the house after the collapse but before we knew about it); if he did, he did it about fifteen minutes before it collapsed at 6:05 p.m.

A Google Maps image of the bridge (before the collapse) is here.  It is the wider of the two bridges in the center of the photograph, the one on the left.

More pictures of the intact bridge here.

Shame.

The priest who officiated at my wedding has been laicized by the Vatican because of sexual misconduct -- specifically, the sexual exploitation of teenage boys.

Yuck.  H/t Rich Leonardi, source of all my Cincinnati Archdiocese info.

UPDATE.  No, this is not grounds for an annulment.