The aftermath

It was at least a couple of months after the attack when I decided to try and make contact with the bogeyman to meet with him and apologize for being on his property. I don’t remember how I did it, but suffice to say I arranged a meeting with him. I can’t remember if my mom went with me or not, or maybe she just waited in the car for me. The meeting took place on his front porch, and this was after he and his family had moved in. I remember walking up the driveway, then onto the walkway, and being extremely nervous. Considering that he allowed me to come over meant he must have been at least somewhat amenable to talking with me. The bogeyman’s wife was also there, and she was standing up, leaning against the porch railing. He offered me to have a seat, as he was seated in one of the lawn chairs on the porch. This has been so long ago I don’t really remember exactly what I said, other than that I said I was sorry for wandering around over at their house and causing them any trouble. I said I just wanted to see what was going on. The bogeyman (I’ll call him Pete from now on, though that isn’t his real name) and his wife told me all about the problems they had with people stealing their appliances and building supplies from the house. They also told me that the house builder had a heart attack while the work was being done. I said I was sorry to hear that and I had no idea of the issues they were dealing with at the time. Pete seemed to be accepting of my apology, even though I was only a bit player, if even that, in the drama they had experienced. I had the misfortune of blundering into the trap set for someone else. But I had the sense that his wife, “Lilly”, was intent on blaming me for the builder’s health issues, among other things. Especially as she really could not accuse me of the thefts. She seemed to be looking at me as a scapegoat. The thieves were never caught, so I suppose I was, at least in Lilly’s mind, a convenient target. I apologized to her as well, for what that was worth.

I went home that afternoon with the knowledge that I did the right thing, and that was really all I could do at that point. From then on, I’d spend the rest of the days that I lived there with my parents (until I moved out after college) looking out my bedroom window at Pete and Lilly’s house. There was truly no escape from all of that, and it haunted me for a very long time. It was an albatross that hung from my neck for what seemed like an eternity.

A few months later, in the spring of the next year, I tried to make a peace offering of a couple of pieces of artwork I did while in high school. They declined these, with Pete explaining they would not work with their decor and they had no room for them. But I pretty much knew they rejected my offering because Lilly saw me as the scapegoat and wanted nothing to do with me. I felt like I had totally screwed things up, with regards to my parents also being neighbors of these people. For some reason, I ended up beating myself up over what I felt like was an inability to make amends. Even after I apologized. I have no idea as to why I felt so strongly about that, as Pete and Lilly had no personal meaning or attachment for me and I had never even met them until that fateful day. Looking back after almost 40 years time, I think that they ended up being some sort of placeholder or symbol of something in my life. It was not really about them, but rather it became about what they represented to me. Not unlike the way the New River Gorge Bridge represented the Key Bridge when I went to see it earlier this year. The Key Bridge is destroyed, no longer accessible or useful to anyone anymore, and the meaning it had to me could only be transferred onto a substitute. But of course with Pete and Lilly, things were more complicated, as they are people and not just some inanimate object that has meaning. Likewise it must have been that they were stand-ins for that which was also unavailable to me at that time time in my life.