so…..should we throw rice??

For some reason I get daily updates from Baker B’s teeny little hometown paper. I don’t even remember signing up for them. I think I did it when his sister died and I was looking for her obituary. If so, it took them about two years to actually get around to sending me these updates. Getting them out of the blue was a little surprising. And I keep thinking I need to cancel it because the daily news from Morganton NC is NOT that interesting, and certainly very little happens that warrants an email update. Until yesterday.

Because yesterday, Broughton Hospital (the state mental hospital which is on a cool and very scary 1800s looking campus with ancient frightening buildings which is totally beside the point) (and which recently had its accreditation taken away, also beside the point. Kind of. Well, maybe not really.) was featured on the front page. Because of an elopee situation. In short, two elopees walked off the hospital campus. Two elopees named Timothy and Raymond. Now, that caught my eye. Well, "elopees" caught my eye first as that’s an odd thing to be escaping a mental institution. I was really intrigued when I say the elopees were men, since if you tried to imagine the smallest, most rural,  most conservative, least likely to feature male elopees on the front page of the paper without assuring the readers they were also going straight to hell to burn forevermore town on earth, it would be Morganton.

So I read the story. There seems to be nothing at all mentioned of the actual elopement factor. Just that they walked out because the door was left open. They crossed the street although nobody saw them do it. And then they were apprehended at Burger King.

I even looked up "elopees" just to make sure it’s not a word that has some meaning I’m not familiar with. Not only does it not have a meaning I’m not familiar with, it has no meaning at all, as it’s not an actual word. SO, I’m left to assume that the peerless News Herald did not in fact mean people running off to get married. It meant people running off to, well, run off. Escapees.

My favorite line in the article was at the very end. "When asked if he would leave Broughton on his own again, Fairbanks responded, ‘If they leave the door open.’ "

Well, it’s taken me all afternoon long to write this because we’re two people short and everyone upstairs is gone to a big meeting and their phones are ringing down here as well. So it’s been unusually busy, what with panicking seniors due to graduate next week and their panicking mommies and daddies and drop forms and add forms and students picking up their audits and students requesting audits and then all the bizarre things that have nothing to do with us but we get anyhow. And now it’s time to go. I just had to share.