Stop in the Name of Love

It’s the Monday of Labor Day weekend. As we approach the intersection of Main and Fifth streets, the light, long yellow, turns red. We stop, but the car behind us in the adjacent lane guns it through the intersection. To our left, on Fifth Street,  is a City of Dayton Police Officer in his patrol car. We chuckle a bit, expecting the cop to pull out (he has the green after all) and pursue the scofflaw. To our consternation, the officer simply drives across the intersection at a leisurely pace and onwards to whatever non-pressing destination awaits him.

In the days that follow, I make several attempts to bring this incident to someone’s attention. Anyone. It is deeply disappointing that an officer of the law cares so little for the enforcement of those laws that he simply does not bother. I cannot find anyone who is interested. I leave messages at several different offices and not one single solitary representative of the Dayton Police Department bothers to return my call.

While the Dayton Police Department’s tendency to turn a blind eye towards traffic misdemeanors is worthy of a column in itself, just looking at the issue of red-light tickets in our fair city should be enough to make you pause. From 2003 (when red-light ticket cameras were installed in ten intersections around the city) until June 2011, 92,900 citations for failure to stop were issued. As of last summer, 46,124 remained unpaid, a staggering $3.9 million dollars worth. The city mulled the possibility of impounding vehicles that belonged to individuals who had racked up more than two traffic camera tickets. 53 percent of the local paper’s readership felt that was “too harsh.”

Typical were public comments like this one from “Loralee.” (Quoted here just as she wrote it, non sequiturs and mangled grammar intact.)

“these red light (and now speeding cameras)are causing more accidents then doing good.People are slamming on thier breaks inorder to not go through a red light causeing fender benders wasting police time with these minor traffic accidents. there is a camera just down the street from where I live so I see it all the time.We are already short staffed with police patroling the neighborhoods.Hate the idea! I think they have been watching too much reality tv! Parking wars????!!!! from Dayton by Loralee “

In Seattle, a reporter from the Post-Intelligencer was snagged violating a red light. He wrote a column about the experience (he had “rolled” the light, turning right on red) and attached a poll to his story, inviting readers to make known their feelings about the cameras. A woeful 52 percent opined that the cameras should be “removed completely,” 14 percent thought they could stay but they should have “much smaller” fines, and 8 percent were spread over a variety of non-favorable responses. Only 25 percent of those polled were in favour of increasing the number of red-light cameras. 1 in 4. You know, that’s  pretty shameful. What earthly reason could there be for not wanting a red light camera unless you make it a regular habit to plow through intersections? (There is a famous red-light camera photo of a guilty-looking platinum blond woman with her hand wrapped around the phallus of her passenger– no doubt she was, is and always will be vehemently opposed to cameras.)

The Seattle writer went on to say that now he stops at yellow lights. In Boston, we used to joke that the light turning yellow meant “speed up.” It’s not such a joke anymore, because the overriding selfish desire of drivers to “make the light” has made that quip a reality. And people die.

People like Barbara Ryan, 44 and her daughter, Joanna, 11, who were killed in Bethpage, NY when a tractor-trailer failed to stop at a red light. The truck driver was not drunk. People like Los Angeles Angels rookie pitcher, Nick Adenhart, who was killed in Riverside, CA when an intoxicated driver failed to stop at an intersection and drove his minivan into the baseball player’s car. An acquaintance of ours, the distinguished and very kind William Dwelly, who was out running errands on a Saturday morning in his hometown of Spartanburg, SC. A woman driving a truck was distracted and “missed the light.” She was not drunk. She was not charged. Bill was killed. The poor sap just trying to cross the street in the photo accompanying this piece. Journalist David Halberstam who was being driven to an interview by a student. The student (not drunk) was anxious to “make the light” and turned left in front of an oncoming car. Think for a minute of two-year-old Morgan Lee Pena, napping in her car seat as her mother drove her home from a play date. A harried businessman, not drunk,  trying to make a call to say he’d be late for a meeting missed a stop sign and smashed broadside into Morgan’s mother’s car. Little Morgan died of fatal head injuries. The man received two tickets and a fifty dollar fine.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)  classifies broadside (or t-bone) collisions as the most dangerous kind of car accident. While these collisions only account for approximately 29 percent of all automobile accidents, they make up 51 percent of all traffic fatalities. Look at it this way: more people are killed by being broadsided than are killed in every other kind of car accident put together.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, cars are not engineered to absorb side-impact force. Though some now have side air-curtains, many still have very little in the way of shock-sustaining forces. Sport utility vehicles are very prone to rollover when hit from the side. The other reason has to do with the way our bodies are engineered. Our necks and backs and brains are built to withstand the motion that we think of as “whiplash,” a violent forward and backward motion. But it doesn’t work as well when the blow is from the side, resulting in head and brain injuries, skull fractures and broken necks.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving have been very successful in developing an enormous stigma for drinking-and-driving. They take credit for reducing “alcohol-related traffic deaths” since 1982 by nearly one-third. Their lobbying efforts have led to prison sentences for repeat offenders.  They were successful in reducing an actionable blood alcohol level from .12 to .10 to .08 percent. They spearheaded a constitutionally questionable program that allows law enforcement to establish “sobriety check points” where drivers could be stopped without any probable cause and examined as to their ingestion of alcohol.

A 120-pound woman with an average metabolism can reach a .08 BAC by consuming two six-ounce glasses of wine over a period of two hours, and in fact, people with BAC of .08 to .10 are involved in fewer significant car accidents than individuals with BAC of .01 to .03, which is what you can achieve with a single dose of cough syrup. Eventually the founder of MADD, Candi Lightner, was forced out of the organization by people she describes as “radical prohibitionists” and she herself has joined a DC-area liquor lobby.

“Driving while impaired” may be the only offense that can be prosecuted because a situation exists in which an actual crime might occur. It is a bit like prosecuting a hungry person in a grocery store because they might shoplift a loaf of bread.  I don’t think people should drive while impaired– whether they are impaired by fatigue, low blood sugar, prescription medication, cell phone use or the fact that they had a fight with their boss, kid or significant other. But there is absolutely no certainty that an individual getting into a car after having a glass of wine with dinner or a beer after work will cause any harm to any one.

Yet, the local gendarmes spend considerable effort and expense on questionable “sobriety checkpoints”  every holiday weekend of the year– and all the while allowing any number of drivers to blow through controlled intersections, putting themselves and dozens of others at terrible risk. If a driver makes it a habit to run red lights, how many times do you think that he’ll be able to do so without being involved in a serious accident? One time? Five times? Ten times?  Just counting the intersections where there are red-light cameras, drivers in Dayton have breached the red  light nearly a hundred thousand times in eight years.

Perhaps you’re not one of those people who pushes the yellow light, sliding through as it turns red. Maybe you’re a fine upstanding citizen in that regard. Or are you rolling those right-on-red “stops”?  The law is not that we merge, you know. It’s that we come to a full stop. We once saw a Dayton Regional Transit Authority bus nearly take out a guy that was walking his two dogs . He was crossing a side street, and the walk-light was in his favor, when the bus decided to move. He jumped back and the bus driver slammed on the brakes, but it was a very near thing. Last month one of my son’s classmates was knocked down and knocked out while standing on a corner. A woman in a Chevy Tahoe didn’t see him, didn’t look, and the impact tossed his body twenty feet.  You have to stop, a complete and utter stop.

Here’s the way to make people stop running red lights, blowing through stop signs, rolling around corners without slowing down and otherwise endangering everyone around them:

First offense is a thousand dollar fine.

Second offense is a thousand dollar fine and 3 day mandatory jail sentence.

Third offense is a thousand dollar fine, 7 days mandatory jail sentence, and license suspension until a Driver’s Education course is completed.

Fourth offense is a thousand dollar fine, 30 days mandatory jail sentence, license suspension, driver education and impound of car for six months.

If Dayton had been charging a thousand dollars on all those red-light citations, they could have collected (or at least  been owed) 97 million dollars. Wouldn’t you slow down and stop at the yellows if you knew there was the potential for those kinds of penalties?

Every morning my husband and son travel through 32 controlled intersections downtown on the way to school. My husband goes through all 32 again on his way  home. When school is over, we go through this slalom again. Everyday I worry that the law of averages is going to spell disaster for someone I love. Or someone you love. There’s nothing important enough to go through the red light at that intersection, the life you save may be your own.

THE MUSKRAT

a true story

The restaurant at the Best Western is nearly empty and the Sheriff prefers it that way. When he’d suggested it as a meeting spot for lunch, he noticed she hesitated before responding.  The place changed hands so often that even the locals stopped trying to keep up. It had been a good run for Tom down at the sign shop, though, changing out everything every time someone thought they had the “just the thing” for this dusty cow town north of the Park.  Truth was, there wasn’t really a decent place for lunch in town.

She is late. She is usually late, but that’s alright. He likes her better than the damn kids that the other paper seem to have on rotation. They always march into his office like they are entitled to something, wanting– hell, demanding details he couldn’t possibly give them. How would they like to read that their own Dad had been ground up in the combine before an officer had been out to tell the family? Damn kids. And if you needed one of them to write something, well forget it.

She wasn’t like that. She’d done some nice stories to help the levy pass. And she’d been on a ride-along when they’d found the dead ranch hand wrapped in barbed wire. Poor bastard left the safety off the PTO, and his shirt got caught. Danny said she’d been cool. Sad for the man’s family and all, but not hysterical like you’d expect some women to be.

The door opens and light fills the dreary restaurant for a minute. He can see her in the doorway, peering into the shadows before hurrying over.

“Hey, hi. Sorry I’m late.” He rises to greet her, shakes her hand.

“How have you been?”

She nods.

“Good, busy,” she replies, sliding into the chair across from him. “You know how it is,” she says, though in truth, he doesn’t. His days are quite predictable. It’s different for the guys on shift, of course but the scenery doesn’t change much in his office,  and with that bitch of a clerk he has, he doesn’t much like being there. That’s another thing he never quite understood. How could a woman like this one be such good friends with his clerk?

That was one of the reasons he started asking her to meet over lunch. He hated seeing the two women together. That phrase, “thick as thieves” always sprang to mind. Didn’t matter, she was here now.

He is concerned about some things she’s written about the one deputy. He begins to say so when the waitress comes to take their order. A burger for him and –

“I’ll have the club sandwich and a coffee,” she says and hands the menu back to the waitress. The Sheriff wonders if the waitress is one of the Bailey girls. He thinks so. Whoever it is, the boyfriend’s in the county lockup for knocking her around.

“I could use a bourbon, but I guess it’s a little early in the day,” the reporter says, laughing. “And you’re on duty and all, that wouldn’t do.” He grins back at her.  He needs to talk to her about this Deputy. He knows that she has her suspicions. You don’t have to be a genius to read between the lines of what she’s already written. And God only knows what the clerk has told her.

“Look,” he says.”I know you have a problem with one of the guys . . . “

She shrugs.

“Well, you know, people make mistakes and all. I know some of the things he does look a little  . . . ” He can’t think of the word.

“Illegal?” she offers.

“Well, I was thinking ‘unorthodox,’” he says the word popping into his head just a second later than he needed it.

“You’re going to have to come to grips with this,” she tells him, smiling. “I am worried that this Deputy is a danger to the community.”  A danger? He didn’t expect that.

“Now, I don’t think he’s actually dangerous, he just needs to do better at following procedure.”

She raises her eyebrows, and begins to enumerate her concerns when the food arrives. The bun on the hamburger is cold. He hates that. How difficult would it be for them to throw the bun on the grill for a minute? Burger’s not bad though. She is pulling a spear with a green ruffly end out of one-quarter of her sandwich.

“People are talking to me about things he’s done,” she says.

“Grain of salt,” he interrupts. She passes him the salt shaker. “No, I mean take it with a grain of salt.”

“Oh, I do. One woman could be someone with a vendetta, two could be friends, when you get to five, you start to wonder. Have you read the transcripts from his divorce?”

“No, I don’t pry,” he tells her.  She laughs.

“Well, ‘prying’ is my job. You know that.” She takes another bite of sandwich and it is quiet  for a moment while they eat. “It makes you wonder how he passed the psych eval at the academy.”  The Sheriff says nothing.

“Did he pass the psych eval?”

He sighs.

“Not the first time.”

“Not the first time?  How did he get a second time?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have any insight into the academy, I don’t know how they do things up there. And you know he was already in the reserves when I became Sheriff.”

She looks at him and her face says “Give me a break.” His wife often looks that way at him.

“But you made him a regular deputy.”

“I didn’t have any choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“It had already been arranged before I got here.”  He had thought this would be a nice retirement from the patrol. Sheriff of a sleepy little town. The undersheriff did seem to have a lot of irons in the fire and sometimes that relationship seemed upside down to him. He thought when he took this job that he would have to be in charge. Rogue cops. Shit, he didn’t even want to know about it. He didn’t know what to do  anymore.

She is talking quietly about the problem deputy, stacking up the ruffled toothpicks from her sandwich in a neat pile on the side of the plate as she speaks.  Yeah, he knew the guy was a problem, but what was he supposed to do? If they tried to fire him, the union would be on them like white on rice. She is laying out the issues as orderly as her toothpicks, he can just imagine what it would look like in newsprint. She says something specific about the deputy that catches his attention.

I wonder how she knows that, he  muses, nodding his head without even realizing it. The dispatchers like her too, they might have said something, or the bitch of a clerk. Then he remembers seeing her with the coroner, their heads bent together over a file. Shit. That guy always had to be a goddamn hero, strutting around like Clint Eastwood.  More than once he’d walked past them  talking and they’d gone quiet, he was sure of it. For a minute he wonders if the coroner is fucking her, and then dismisses it. Too much of a straight arrow.

She is still smiling and talking though, and looking to him.

“Really, I need your help,”  she says, lifting the coffee to her mouth.

“I don’t know what I can do,” he tells her. He wants to tell her that he wishes she would just forget it, cut the guy some slack. Everybody makes stupid mistakes at some point. “We’re keeping an eye on him,”  he says instead.

She says okay, thank you, but she is clearly disappointed.

“More coffee?” the waitress asks, the pot hovering.

“Sure, why not” he responds, jovial.  When the waitress leaves, he leans in towards the reporter. “When I was in high school, in — “

She names the town, outside Billings.

“Right. Late one afternoon I was out with a bunch of guys. We were young and stupid, you know how guys are. Well, maybe you don’t.”  He sips the coffee, burns his tongue.  Damn. “Anyway, we caught this muskrat down at the edge of the river. It almost seemed tame. You know for such a fat little thing they can run like a sonofabitch.  So, we caught this muskrat and tied a rope around and followed it around along the riverbank for a while.   Then one of the guys decides that we should tie it to the back of the pickup and see how fast it can go.” He doesn’t look at her as he talks, studying his hands instead.

“And we start to drive around. After a little while the muskrat starts to scream, like a rabbit you know?” He looks up and she nods. Her face is totally neutral. “The guys are all laughing like it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever seen. One of ‘em says ‘I guess that muskrat don’t run so fast.’ I look out the back window of the pickup and I can see the muskrat bouncing up and down on the road at the end of the rope. It’s not screaming anymore. Just bouncing along and bits of it are flying off. It’s close to suppertime and I know I need to get home. When I get out of the truck I walk around the back and it’s just like a little piece of bloody meat tied there.”

She is looking at him, a clear level gaze. She hasn’t touched her coffee.

“Ah, hell. I don’t know why I told you that,” he says. “I’ve never told anyone that story. I haven’t told my wife that story.”

The waitress sets the ticket down on the table.

“No hurry. I’ll be your cashier when you’re ready.”  Neither of them respond, and she moves off.  He wishes she would say something, but she is just watching him, as if there might be something more to the story.  Something to save him.  But there isn’t.

“If you ever tell anyone I told you this story I’ll say you’re a goddamn liar.”  She nods, and then reaches for the check.  ”No, I’ll get it– you can get it next time,” he says though he doubts there will ever be another next time.

“Okay, thank you. ” she says at last. “Oh God, look at the time. I’m supposed to be in a meeting with the superintendent of schools in three minutes.”

“Tell Victor I said hello.”  She nods and smiles. “I will.”

Then she is gone, out the door and disappearing into the sunshine. It takes him a few minutes to find the waitress and pay the bill. By the time he is headed to the pick-up, the sky is clouded over , a cold wind kicking up out of the north. He wonders if it will snow tonight.

DAYS OF INFAMY

It’s the 70th anniversary of the bombing of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base today.  2,458 people were killed; 68 of them were civilians and 55 were Japanese. Though we weren’t officially at war, we’d heard the drumbeat coming since 1938, with the Japanese invasion of China and the aggressions of  Nazi Germany in Britain and other allied countries.

Franklin Roosevelt called December 7th  ”a date which will live in infamy” and promptly declared war on Japan. Hawaii, 2400 miles off the coast of California, was a protectorate of the United States and wouldn’t become the 50th state for 18 more years.

Fewer than 200 Pearl Harbor survivors are still alive today, most of them in their 90s. Yet, every year, on December 7th, we stir up our old nationalist outrage, revisiting this “sneak attack” by the “Japs”, picking at the long-healed wound.

Let us consider for a moment a few instances of our retaliation for the bombing of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base that killed 2,335 servicemen.

Beginning in  1942, 110,00 American citizens of Japanese descent were moved from their homes and businesses to internment camps in the most Godforsaken and isolated places in the United States. At the time there were only 127,000 Americans of Japanese descent in the country. It didn’t matter if your family had been in the United States for many generations. It didn’t matter if you were as little as 1/16th Japanese.  Orphaned infants with “one drop of Japanese blood” (a letter from one official explains) were included in the program.

Lt. General John L. DeWitt, who administered the internment program said in testimony before Congress:  ”I don’t want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty. But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.”

DeWitt was more colloquial with newspaper reporters, repeatedly telling them “A Jap’s a Jap.”  The Los Angeles Times wrote an editorial explaining why the internment program was “essential”: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched.”

We sent 110,000 of our own people to live in rudimentary barracks in the desert, we took their businesses and their homes and we never gave them back.  There was an attempt at redress 40 years later, when survivors of the camps were each offered a $20,000 payment. On the sites of each camp, there is a monument to the sons of internees who died in service to the United States Armed Forces in World War II.

Three and a half years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, on August 6, 1945– after six months of intense fire-bombing against Japan, we dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, immediately killing approximately 80,000 people, almost all of them women, children and the elderly. Three days later, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing more than 40,000, again almost all of them women, children and elderly.

Of the women, children and elderly killed on those two days, 72,000 died from flash burns, 36,000 percent from falling debris and 12,000 from other causes. In the next two months, more than 120,000 more Japanese civilians would die from burns, radiation sickness and injuries. The cities were obliterated, the whole country- about the size of California-  was poisoned.

The fact that we have a reasonable and cordial relationship with Japan today has a lot more to do with them and their capacity for forgiveness than it does with us.

Before you say, “Oh, well, that was 70 years ago, and things were different then,” I will leave you this to ponder. Remember our invasion of Baghdad, where we were going to be “seen as liberators,” “freeing” Iraq from the oppression of Sadaam Hussein? Remember watching on television the “Shock and Awe” bombing of Baghdad at night?  Iraq didn’t have a beef with us. In fact, some administrations had enjoyed friendly relations with Hussein. There were, of course, no weapons of mass destruction, and no involvement in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. My husband and I happened to be in Canada the weekend those airstrikes occurred and their newspapers, in 64 pt. headlines reported it (perhaps more accurately) as “Attack on Iraq!” In that initial unprovoked military action against another country, with whom we were not at war, more than 30,000 Iraqi civilians died.

So, before we ever talk about “Days of Infamy,” let us first look in the mirror.

RED FLAGS

It’s hard to say exactly when I realized that things didn’t seem quite right.  I’ve known this man for more than eight years, but it’s a friendship built mostly on email exchange and the very occasional telephone call. Still, you pick up a sense of people’s habits, their routines, the way they approach the world.

This is a delicate matter, and I don’t want to cause undue embarrassment, so let’s just call  him “Dave.” We all know a million Daves, right? He’s a member of the last grown-up generation. He is well-educated, eclectic but well-informed in his tastes and opinions.  Compassionate and perhaps just a bit quirky, with a great love for dogs and sailboats and literature. Oh, and wine, he’s a great fan of good wine and can be quite a bore about it. (Sorry, Dave.)

Long before the entrenchment of Facebook in our lives, people with common interests used to communicate through internet forums, and it was in such a place that we met Dave, over our mutually beloved breed of dog. That sounds convivial enough, doesn’t it?  What’s remarkable is the kind of cesspool of backstabbing, jealousy and aggression these chat-rooms become. Factions form up, it’s almost like high school, where Mean Girls rule.

A frequent visitor to the same forum was a sweet, deeply Christian woman we’ll call “Nancy.” Nancy raised this breed of dog too, and had for nearly twenty years. She lived in a very, very remote place and would share the challenges of life there, with all of its triumphs and griefs. We all offered our heartfelt sympathies when she reported that one of her very favorite dogs “got sick” and she had to shoot it with a pistol, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that we were pretty disturbed too.

I confess I didn’t have much patience for her. We lived in a remote place too and I didn’t once find myself having to shoot my own dog. But reading her posts was like trying to swallow dollops of treacle, as she laid on her Christian faith with a cement trowel. She and Dave became fast friends, though their relationship was confined to long phone calls, as they lived on opposite edges of the continent.

Who can understand the attraction that one person has for another?  Past a certain age, physical appearance drops down the scale in importance, but common interests and companionship and mutual appreciation count for a lot. Nancy didn’t strike me as an intellectual wunderkind, but perhaps that was my own prejudice and distaste for her religious fervor. Anyway, Dave found reason to foster their friendship, and beyond that it really was none of my business.

Then a year ago Dave’s Facebook status (because of course, we’ve all fallen into that vortex now) changed from “Single” to “In a relationship” and as jaw-dropping as it was to some of us, Dave had moved Nancy (and her dogs, and her elderly horse) more than 4000 miles to his house.  Well, you know what they say, love is strange. I knew that Dave had been lonely, and I’m sure he must have believed he was offering Nancy a chance at a real life, a release from her struggle in the bush. Maybe this would work for them, and that would be wonderful.

Then Dave’s Facebook page disappeared. I mentioned its deletion in a tax-day email to him that was otherwise about sailboats.

“Nancy felt threatened by the Facebook account, so I deleted it, along with most of Yahoo,” he wrote. Later, Dave confided that Nancy had written a woman with whom he had a friendship of forty years duration and asked the woman not to contact Dave again. It wasn’t then that the little bell began to ring, I only remember feeling very sad. Not sad for Dave, particularly. He’s a grown man and can well make his wishes known, I thought.  No, I felt sorry for Nancy, because I know what it’s like to be in the grips of gut-wrenching insecurity, to see nearly every female as a likely threat to my happiness and well-being.

That was the story of my first marriage and what a misery it was. Poor old Bob wasn’t even doing anything wrong, though he had lots of women friends. I was the problem. I didn’t truly believe that I was loved, and so I doubted him at every turn. I was very sorry to see that Nancy was stricken with this lack of faith in herself, and in Dave. It’s one thing to wrangle these feelings in college, another thing altogether when you and your partner are in the September of your lives, with plenty of past behind you, a collection of friends and old lovers, and a wide variety of interests. How can you hope to circumscribe the full life of another into such a tiny little box?

Then I had an email from Nancy, with a photo from a subdivision entrance that shares my name. “Dave and I get such a kick out of this every time we pass it we think of you.”  The next email message I had from Nancy asked me not to call Dave anymore. This struck me as really peculiar, because in the many years I’ve known Dave, I’ve probably spoken to him on the telephone a dozen times, and mostly he’s called me. Why would she think I’d been calling him and why would she ask me to stop?

“Some partners are very insecure,” Dave wrote. “Since dropping out of Facebook to keep the peace here, I no longer have any way of keeping in touch with all the activities of many friends, some of which communicate by no other way.”

Now the bell was beginning to ring. Then Dave broke his hip falling backwards down the stairs. Then he got food poisoning so severe it landed him in the hospital.  And a second time. Nancy wrote me again citing things I’d said in emails five or six years ago. She complained at length about the relationships he tried to have with other women. The alarm bells were ringing, a cacophony in my head now. Red flags were running up the shrouds.  She told me that if I didn’t support their relationship that I was no longer welcome to contact him.

So I didn’t. I called social services in that mid-Atlantic state instead and talked to a social worker about elder abuse. The National Center on Elder Abuse estimates that over a million older Americans are subject to abuse each year, but caution that the figure could be much higher, as most instances go unreported.  Because of the shortage of reports, there are fewer than fifty peer-reviewed studies on elder abuse, and we rely largely on educated guesses as to numbers and frequency and situation. The American Psychological Association puts the figure at more than double that of the NCEA, believing that more than two million are victims, and their findings indicate that most incidents do not happen in a nursing home. Instead, people are victims of members of their family, caregivers and other individuals in the household. And it isn’t just the infirm at risk.

I spoke with a social worker at length. I explained that Nancy was driving away Dave’s old friends. I explained that although Dave was nearing seventy that he was very active, and not too long ago was running marathons. I pointed out that in the eight years I’d known him he had not been ill or incapacitated in that entire period of time as much as he had been in the last year. I said “Maybe it’s nothing, but this concerns me.” She thanked me for calling and said they’d get back to me in the next few days.

Two months went by. There was a telephone message from Dave, he thought a keystroke logger had been installed on the computer to track the sites he visited and the people he contacted. There was an email message, purportedly from Dave that read “I’m fine, thanks to you! Love ya, Dave.”  Dave is about the last person in the world that I would expect to sign off an email “Love ya!” But Nancy isn’t.

Nancy is not my Facebook friend. Hell, she’s not my friend in any realm. All that sanctimonious treacle, I couldn’t stand it. But 23 of my “friends” are “friends” of hers, and through them I see the photographs of her life there alongside Dave. I’d estimate there are approximately 100 photographs of  my old friend. He is not looking at the camera in a single one of them. In some, he lies on the floor with a dog or two, his hands over his head, as if to shield himself.  My husband urges me to call social services again.

“They must not have found anything,” I tell him. “They said they’d call back, and they never have.” But I am worried and he is too.

And then the letter comes. I have to read it twice, three times to really grasp what’s written.

“In the course of our investigation, we have discovered a preponderance of evidence that (Dave) is in need of protective assistance and we will be making our services available to him.”

A preponderance of evidence. Not just evidence, but a preponderance of it.

It horrifies me, it really does. I am relieved that I made the call, but I am very sad that my awful fears are confirmed.

Some people will read this and they will recognize the characters and they will be outraged that I have written about poor, sweet Nancy this way. Some people will read this and wonder if they should make the call about a situation they’re aware of. Do it. You don’t have to know for certain that abuse is taking place. That’s for a social worker somewhere to determine. But if you think someone you know is in danger, or is suffering, don’t let it go.

I have no doubt that Nancy herself will read this, because it will be pointed out to her, and I don’t care. I want Nancy to know that I know, that we know what kind of person she is under that thin shell of sugar. I want Nancy to know that if something happens to Dave that she will be suspect. I know Nancy thinks she’s landed on Easy Street and that what belongs to Dave might one day belong to her, if she can only control him long enough.

And I have a message for Dave. Dear friend, you’ve earned whatever happiness life gives you, but sometimes capitulation is not worth the false sense of peace you get in return. However you curtail your social nature, it will never be enough for someone so insecure. You might be furious that I’ve left your laundry flapping in the breeze like this. I wouldn’t blame you. We love you anyway, and if you need us, please call.