Sunday, September 05, 2004

Sunday, September 05, 2004

Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come.

As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare,

so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them~Ecclesiastes 9:12

I was reminded of the fragility of life today. You wouldn 't expect to run into death on the way to the trash dump.

After covering high school football north of Nashville Friday night I rolled into my driveway around 3 a.m. "Shouldn't your work pay for a hotel?" you might ask and if you did I would deem you correct. But see there's a problem at hand when I purchase a hotel room on Priceline for the wrong night. Yep, and I'm stilling trying to wash the "L" off my forehead. I didn't go into the situation blindly though. I found out about my mishap mere seconds after buying the room Tuesday night, and Priceline maintains a strict "no changes" policy. So, technically my work paid for a hotel room that I never used (don't tell) and I drove back across the state by myself last night because I'm too stubborn to let AmeriSuits take my money and someone else's money for a hotel room.

All that to sat that I didn't wake up until around 11:00 this morning, which made me feel crappy. I hate sleeping in, but then since I realized I had slept in and felt bad about it I couldn't see how I'd feel any worse for kicking around the house all day. Somewhere around 4:00 something bit me and I decided to haul an old recliner and Veronica's old carpet to the dump.

Driving along. Pulling into trash dropoff. An old man comes running out of a little building wagging his finger at me. He tells me that you can't dump furniture on weekends.

"So I could have done this yesterday?"

"Yep, ya sure coulda."

"But not today?"

"Nope, but isit uh any account?"

"Huh, do you mean is it worth anything?"

He chuckles, leans against the door of my truck and looks back at me with a pair of piercing blue eyes. At this point I'm not sure why he starts this conversation. Perhaps he saw the "Press" sticker in my window or maybe he just wanted someone to talk to. I guess sitting by yourself all day with everyone's trash would get sort of depressing now that I think about it. He turns a spews a wad of chewing tobacco out of the side of his mouth.

"Ya ear bout Billy Ray Kinney (name changed here)?"

"Naw, whos that?" (Trying painfully not to appear so not-from-Dayton)

"Aw, I thot eryone knewd Billy Ray. He an is boy gottintoit over in Morgantown and he shot em dead on da street." (Trigger goes off in my head. I do work at a newspaper. I'm a sports editor, but I know that there hasn't been a homicide in Rhea County in nearly five years.)

"Whar'd ya ear dat?"

"Oh, I seen day liiights and serens come by and Martha and J.C. came and tol me and den Bobby and Joe Pendleton drove by and Larry and da Goins boys ....."

Names of people that surely I should know keep flowing from the old man and I really find it hard to believe that he thinks I know who he's talking about. After several minutes of relaying what he "heeaard" of the shooting, the man stops and just leans against my truck. The engine is still running and is still in drive.

"So I still can't dump this stuff here?"

"Nope, not til Toosdey...so whadya think wa'r gonna do wid da trash when we can't dig no mo holes in da ground?"

At this point I just stared at the man. We had gone from talking about dumping my trash, to a potential homicide, to people that I had no clue about and now he proceeded to talk about the possibilities of grinding trash up before burying it and how he had helped drill holes in the ground at the landfill to release the methane build-ups. I slowly began to let the truck drift toward the highway, but the man kept following me and talking.

Hurricane Frances. Football. More advanced theories for trash grinding. How close you can get to a methane leak before you pass out or become nauseated. (I'm not making this up.) Finally, after a few more minutes I told the man I'd come back "Toosdey" and dump my trash. He smiled and waved me off. I guess we talked 10 minutes or so.

I got on my phone and called John (my editor) and asked him if he'd heard of a shooting or murder and he hadn't. He called me back a few minutes later after talking with the county sheriff and said that there had been a homicide. Actually it was a double homicide. He couldn't get away and asked me to head over to the area and take some photos. There was something strangely exciting about going to a murder scene, so I didn't mind going to Morgantown too much...until a few minutes later.

Morgantown is not a pleasant place. Houses, many of them dilapidated trailers, sit crammed against each other, while aimless roads weave in and out of the swampy, kudzo-infested land. I honestedly had no idea that the "town" extended as far back as it did. Actually, it's a community. Several homes looked as if they didn't have electricity and several more had entire yards of caged roosters for cock-fighting, a catalyst for drug use and other illegal activity in the area. Soon enough I came upon cars parked wildly about the one-lane streets, people crying and hugging each other and areas of land roped off by yellow tape. I got the usual stare from people, the what-the-heck-are-you-doing-here stare, but this time it was tinted with sorrow. Other people went about their regular activities as if nothing had happened, and still others gawked like they were staring at a procession of elephants holding umbrellas and wearing pink dresses. A tv camera crew rolled in and began looking for a place to film. Consequently, a man ran me and the camera crew off of his property yelling like a banshee while I was taking pictures of police and the house of the victims.

It turns out that the old man at the trash dropoff was right. Sort of. Billy Ray and his son were involved in the incident but not with each other. A third man, I'll call him Claud, was seen walking down the street with a beer bottle in hand and a gun somewhere on his body, noticeably intoxicated. For whatever reason, he got into an argument with Billy Ray's son and shot him outside of the son's house. Billy Ray probably tried to stop the drunk next and was shot as well. The two men were ruled dead at the scene.

I can't really explain how I felt. "Why does God allow such things to take place?" was one question that circulated through my head. I know the answer, but it's not easy medicine to swallow when you can't see how it will do you any good at the present. It seems odd to think that God may want us to feel certain ways that leave us struggling at certain times, but if that weren't the case then wouldn't He give us the complete answer key to life and its many puzzles?

It was senseless. And heinous. And I didn't and don't really have the words to describe the experience very well. Life truly is a vapor.

I left Morgantown with a sense of release, like being set free from prison but retaining the memories that happened therein. I drove around for a bit and returned to my house. I washed the dishes and did some laundry. I moved furniture around into different arrangements, rearranged, and then arranged differently again. I put on an old Pfr cd. I even thought about shaving for the first time since Wednesday. And then, I sat and flipped from channel to channel, thinking how nice it would be to hear the old man talk about advanced philosophies of trash-grinding and adventures drilling holes into landfills.

I suppose we'll talk about or listen to anything when the time and circumstances call for it. When our own existence is challenged.

So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God's hands, but no man knows whether love or hate awaits him. All share a common destiny---the righeous and the wicked, the good and the bad...This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun.: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of men, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live...anyone who is among the living has hope...go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do.~Ecclesiastes 9