The answer, pointing to your noggin, was a joke. I'm pretty sure I first it heard from my dad, or Uncle John, as a little kid growing up in the Bronx.
It is the very question I ask as I read the accounts of neighbors coping with the latest heinous crime.
As a girl from the Bronx I've never thought that I'd be bounced from anywhere I wanted to be. As a widow in major transition I am in the position to leave this depraved city. Not only has nothing changed here in Oaktown, it has gotten worse than it was when I first moved here in the 80's.
I'm not even talking about the gun issue. Let's start from the criminal activity from the top down, a vacuum of genuine leadership. Criminals rule, as we saw today from the latest news of a local 'leader'.
This latest insane news came as neighbors were mourning the loss of a woman that lives, lived just around the block from me. I drive the same streets as she did. I walk my dog the same blocks as she and many other lovely Maxwell Park residents do daily.
Judy lived one block over, another neighbor that survived a shooting, one block the other direction. I could draw concentric circles of crime from here. Gives pause to the meaning of LIVE, and HOME.
Except that I love my 'house', my neighbors and the incredible beauty of Oakland, I have Rich's words in my mind all the time, 'I don't want to die in Oakland'. He did die in Oakland. Of cancer, not a bullet.
I can get global as I grieve. Halliburton admits to concealing evidence and pays a $200,000 maximum fine. We're 'democracy building' oversees when really we can't figure it out here. We've decimated the planet with people and progress and still give a platform to the 'flat earthers' as the ranch owner at 7,500' wonders if his aspen groves will disappear.
I don't know where to go. I do know I don't want it to be here. I wonder daily how to stay in my own skin. I'm fatigued with the conversation, the 'answers', the caring and disappointments, the murders.
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