i’m back!

I bet you didn’t even know I was gone.

I went to visit my parents last week, for only 4.5 days.  I am sad that I live so far away from my mom, but we had fun. On Saturday, there was a cook out – I drank too much and went to bed dizzy.  On Sunday we got up early and went to the race track up in Saratoga, then went to my favorite restaurant where I got spaghetti with meatballs.  The next day my mom made me strawberry shortcake and we went to a yarn shop in Greenport – on a dirt road, in someone’s big shed.  That was exciting, but it’s a good yarn store (Country Wood, zip code is Hudson, NY) and I bought two skeins of Zitron Trekking XXL.  Then the next day, I had lunch with my parents up in Saratoga again, because we went to visit Saratoga Needle Arts, an excellent yarn shop on Broadway.  I bought some Sockotta sock yarn which I don’t really like but I like the colors, and two skeins of malabrigo which I am making a scarf out of.

THEN!  On Wednesday, there was a smackdown on the front lawn of the neighbors diagonally across the street of my parents – this is the neighborhood I grew up in, always very peaceful and quiet with some quietly strange weirdos, but we just ignored them.  Back story:

Judy owns the house.  She works feverishly from home to make enough money to pay the bills, since she has a massive gambling problem.  Her husband Henry left her a few years ago after he had an almost fatal heart attack, to shack up with a woman half his age.  Amanda is Henry’s daughter, but I guess she splits her time between her mother’s and stepmother’s houses.  Then Jill, Judy’s sister, moved in, to presumably help her pay the bills since her gambling problem is so horrid – refinanced the house to get more gambling money, etc etc.  Then Craig, Jill’s son and Judy’s nephew, got out of jail, right around the time I left – July of last year – and moved into the basement with his girlfriend and her two kids.  (The girlfriend is supposedly “good looking” according to my dad, but I told him that doesn’t mean anything, she’s still a piece of trash if she is with him.)  Craig was a small time drug dealer, and violated his parole, and had to serve out the whole sentence.  Mike is Judy’s son, Craig’s cousin, the manager of a local Dunkin’ Donuts, so he’s a loser but a lesser caliber of loser than Craig.  He has a few kids, had the oldest one when he was still in high school, and is on his second wife, who is a hideous BEAST.  (As in, terrifying from far away.)  I think altogether, he has three kids.  So they live there everytime they get evicted, which is often enough.

So, I think we’re up to a potential 11 people in a two bedroom house with one bathroom.

So Wednesday morning, we look out the bay window in the living room and Mike and his wife are on the neighbor’s front lawn, which is weird since these neighbors HATE these people.  Craig, drug dealer-user-alcoholic extraordinaire, is staggering and stumbling around on the front lawn, and is trying to get back into the house but they’ve locked him out.  Ory, across the street neighbor, is telling him to get away, this and that, Mike’s wife is walking toward another house on the street, we can’t figure out what the hell is going on.  Craig gets into his car and peels off. We’re leaving for the airport, the police K-9 unit comes, and we are clueless.

On the way to the airport, we stopped to eat, and our neighbor, Nancy, who had just gotten home when this unfolded, calls my mom.  She had the kids (how many and whose, we aren’t sure) and took them to Pizza Hut – she tries to be friendly and winds up in the middle of family issues, as you can tell.  Craig beat up his aunt, drug and alcohol related (and I am not talking about some marijuana, something more major), and was threatening to come back and blow up the house.  Everyone in the neighborhood was warned to stay inside and lock the doors and windows, an all points bulletin was put out for him.

So last night, I ask my mom what happened – they got him, of course, but his aunt wouldn’t press charges.  She’s a pushover with a gambling problem and needs 11 people in her house to pay the bills, apparently.  Mike wanted to press charges but because he technically doesn’t live there, they told him he couldn’t.  So, then we find out that the girlfriend is 2 months pregnant and she’s obviously getting abused, with bruises and cuts and all kinds of crap that everyone in the house just ignores.  Apparently the original situation started with the girlfriend in the bathroom refusing to come out – he got pissed and somehow beat up his aunt?

So how many people have to get attacked, how many people have to be abused, before someone wakes up and says NO?  I don’t know, and I will never understand it.  I will never understand allowing your attacker back into your house.  Never.