I may have told part of this story before, but bear with me here. The last time I lived in my old hometown, I had arrived there with my daughters, to live with my grandfather for several months while the man needed to do several short work assignments in three different states. The idea was that I could provide assistance for my grandfather, and the kids wouldn't have to attend three different middle schools over the course of only one or two grade levels. Unfortunately, a month after our arrival my grandfather was diagnosed with a third round of cancer, and he died not long after. Three months before he died, he had leased his garage apartment to a man who was a couple years behind me in high school, who apparently did not follow the straight and narrow after graduation. This man never actually paid any of the rent he owed (and had gotten away with running an extension cord across grandpa's back yard to an exterior plug, so he also didn't have to pay for his own electricity, and my nearly blind grandfather never caught on), so while grandpa was still in decline in the hospital, I informed this former schoolmate that he had worn out his welcome and should find other living arrangements. In the filthy apartment he left behind, I found several items purloined from the garage below and from inside the main house, that he had intended to sell, and my uncle found a page printed from the internet right after this guy had moved in, titled, "So you want a cheaper crystal meth recipe." Even after I evicted him, we had problems with break-ins, especially at our ranch where he had been going and cutting down trees to sell for firewood (claiming that he had been given permission to do it the year before by my grandfather, who was long dead by this time). Things went missing and locks kept getting mysteriously cut on the ranch gate. One day, I went to the cabin to find a parade of household goods and appliances abandoned on the road up the hill. The cabin itself had been completely emptied, but a massive thunderstorm had interrupted their attempts to drag everything down the hill and raise it over the gate that now sported an un-cuttable lock. I called the sheriff, and told them who I believed had done it, but there was never an arrest. Weeks later, he was finally caught with someone else's stolen goods at his house, and arrested. And then we learned that he had suddenly and unexpectedly died while at a rehab boot camp. We were thrown for a loop. Some of my friends remembered the little golden-haired boy that he was when we were in school together, and some of my extended family grieved for the loss of a cousin or brother. (It was a small town. Of course there was a cousin-of-a-cousin-of-an-in-law kind of relationship.) My children and I had had such a different experience with him. Until he died, we were constantly looking over our shoulders, making sure doors were locked and blinds were pulled. We had been traumatized by the thefts and were convinced he was outside every dark window at night, looking in, seeing us when we were vulnerable. After he died, we spent several days looking at each other, saying, is that it? Is it over? The question that kept coming into my head was, "What do you do when the boogyman dies?" I couldn't celebrate. Property theft does not warrant a death penalty in my book, not by a longshot. But was I allowed to feel relief that we were ostensibly safe? I never fully sorted the conflict out in my heart.
The reason I bring this up is I am experiencing a similar cognitive dissonance. As I was stepping into the shower this morning, the man got a call from our daughter, telling us that her truck (the one on semi-permanent loan from her dad) was stolen from her apartment complex overnight. I am horrified that someone stole such a vital tool from my baby, as she needs it to get to work, especially now that she finally has an archaeology job and could take it into the field as she has dreamed of doing since she first rebuilt the engine on this thing ten years ago. She had just texted us a picture of it on her first field assignment, and it was the culmination of so many things she has worked for her whole life, in one photograph. And two days later, the truck was gone. But where does my conflict come into this? I hate that truck. I mean red hot heat of a thousand suns hate. I think it is ugly and uncomfortable and a bucket of crap. But she and her father have this obsession with it. They don't see ugly. They see rugged and outdoorsy. They see a simple engine design and a decent four wheel drive capacity. They see a classic. I am still scarred from being forced to take it on a January ski vacation two years ago, when the emergency brake kept freezing in place, and the heater did not work. (Picture driving over Loveland Pass, right at full dark, the temperature outside was -7, and with five bodies in the car, the temperature inside was only warm and humid enough to freeze a thin but noticeable layer of frost on the inside of the windshield. I used my Lowe's club card as an ice scraper, in constant motion for about an hour. The kind of rage I was feeling was not pleasant to be around.) I don't want my daughter carless. I am angry that someone stole it from her and from us. But god help me, I don't really want it back. Am I allowed to admit that? Because it makes me feel like a bad person to say so.
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