Thank god for my dog

by Ross Catrow

Particularly Shooter. Shooter’s job in our family is to let us know when anything is amiss. Outside, inside, under the house, wherever, whenever. So the eruption of barks around 7AM this morning was odd but not unexpected. I assumed the “damn teenagers” were playing their “rap music” or some such.

I guess sometimes it is easy to confuse teens with “angry mob.”

Our office windows opens up to the roof of our porch where you can get a pretty good view up and down our street. Down the block a group of about fifteen people were smashing in the windows and doors of a small one-story cinderblock house. Elsewhere on the block people were headed aimlessly towards Cary St. and the general direction of the Byrd.

We live in an old house built in 1923 in one of the original suburbs of Richmond. This means huge ceilings and equally huge windows. It also means our house is already falling apart without the incessant bangings of an angry mob.

I woke up Val. Fifteen minutes later after I convinced her I wasn’t kidding — that there really was a mob of lunatics tearing a house down on our block. We ran downstairs to see what we could stack in front of our windows: a couch, loveseat, tables, TV (sigh).

That about catches us up to the present.

The mob has moved west (away from us) to the next one-story house and probably doubled in size. The new house isn’t made of cinderblocks and they’re having a much easier time with it. There’s a growing commotion coming from the direction of the Byrd and I see more and more people ambling in that direction.

Its been about six hours since Shooter woke us up. We are barricaded in our house and figuring out what to do next. I don’t think we can ride this out here. Our house just isn’t safe enough. If anyone out there is reading this leave a comment. I think we’d be safer in a group.

Maybe we can head toward a school building or something.