Here's what's happening in our neck of the woods

Just a typical quiet Friday afternoon. Brooke and Andrew were home from school, eating their snack and checking their new email accounts. I was piddling around the house, switching laundry, straightening up, waiting for Emma and Leah to walk through the door at 3:45pm.

Only it was 4:00 and they still weren't home.

A call to the transportation department was in order.

Transportation secretary: Well do you know what's going on?

Me: Um, no. All I know is my children are 15 minutes late getting off the bus.

Secretary: Well, there's been some sort of bank robbery and police chase so some of the roads are blocked off and the buses have been rerouted. We were going to call the parents.....

Me: So...where are my kids?

Secretary: Let me radio the bus driver and find out where she's going to drop them off.

And she proceeded to put me on hold. I stood there holding the phone, with a thousand thoughts running through my head.

Where are the kids. Guess the police cars and caution tape I saw down the street has something to do with this. Where are the kids. We are going to be late for piano lessons. Got to call the piano teacher. Where are the kids. Should probably get a snack for Emma and Leah for on the way to piano. Got to get Brooke and Andrew in the car. Where are the kids. Who is that beeping in--don't recognize the number, going to ignore it. How am I going to get to piano teacher's house if all the roads are blocked off. Where are the kids???

Ms. Secretary gets back on the phone and tells me where the bus driver is going to drop the kids off. Way down the street and around the corner. Good thing I was planning on going to pick them up anyway, because it was kind of far away. And so we head out, away from the brouhaha to the west, in search of the girls.

After passing the police blockade at the other intersection, we found the girls. They piled into the car, full of chatter about the afternoon's excitement. Turns out that call that had beeped in was Emma, using her friend's cell phone. Turns out they had heard the bus driver on the radio with Ms. Secretary and knew that I knew what was going on and where they were and was coming to pick them up.

With everybody finally accounted for, we made our way to piano lessons.

In the process of navigating through the city streets we figured out that rather than the whole main street being blocked off, all the action was at one intersection. The intersection approximately 200 feet away from our house. The intersection where a police chase (which actually passed in front of our house) ended in the fatal shooting of a robbery suspect.

Andrew couldn't understand why someone would want to rob a bank (doesn't he know that's wrong?!?) and wanted to check the news for a "front row seat." And then he proceeded to run around the house pretending to shoot guns. And then he informed me that he wants to be a police officer when he grows up, just like our friend. (Hey mom, was so-and-so down there? No, dear, he works on the other side of town. Oh, well, I want to be a policeman just like him.)

Gulp.

But for now, we are all safe and sound. We can all go back to our quiet suburban lives, in a town that is safer than 97% of cities in the entire United States. We can all sleep well knowing that our city's overall rate of crime is sufficiently low that NeighborhoodScout's analysis shows the city to be one of the safest in both Ohio and the nation.

The only thing that might tell you differently are the little spray-painted T's that remain on the road...just down the street.


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