Tonight's class discussion took a bit of a detour.  After the break, we were talking about neighborhoods.  I was telling those who stuck around during the break about how when I moved into This Old House, we didn't have the foresight to notice the eviction sign on the house next door.  It turned out that the house next door, you see, used to be a meth lab.  A meth lab that exploded.

Over the past four years that we have lived here, the neighborhood has turned over quite a bit.  Apparently it used to be a bad neighborhood, perhaps was even one when we moved in.  Now a lot of the older people and meth-lab folks have either died or been jailed, and young people, such as our four-years-ago selves, have moved in and started renovating.  I'm hoping it's the start of a fabulous gentrification movement that will end in lucrative profit for us.

A girl has to have a dream.

Anyway, I told them the meth-lab story, and how a wonderful young woman bought the house next door after it had been gutted and rebuilt with new wiring and plumbing and all of that sort of stuff.  They seemed surprised at my naivete.  Then I told them about our old apartments - the one on 32nd and Central - the one in which our downstairs neighbor died and was not found for a week - the one from which windows we watched several young felons being chased by the spotlight of the ghetto copter through our backyard and into the projects behind us.  I also told them about the previous one - the one on Warwick and Armour - the one from which we heard so many gunshots that we soon became immune to their sounds.  They seemed surprised I had lived in worse neighborhoods than theirs.  I told them of the night I nailed the windows of my first-floor single apartment shut, because, I, alone at 25, was scared of the sounds that went bump in the night emanating from the abandoned apartment building next door.

God protects fools and children.

"You see, I moved here from Chicago," I told them.  "Even the best neighborhoods in Chicago have their crime and their rubbish and their homeless."

"Crime is everywhere," they told me.

Then R., a thirty-something black man in my class, the one who always connects the lessons somehow back to sex, told me he'd bought guns for both his sisters.  "You don't have to aim," he said.  "Just shoot - they have no idea if you have them in your sights or not."

This was a bizarre conversation for an Iowa farm girl, but maybe not so bizarre when you consider I've lived in the bowels of two major U.S. cities now, in addition to two small towns in Iowa.  The conversation followed a passage I had them read describing one young man's attempt to eat pig lips in a bar.  Somehow, it all seemed to tie together - the ugliness of life, the disgusting qualities of offal, the need to buy your sister a gun and tell her just to aim anywhere and shoot.

I don't have a gun.  We have a baseball bat and an alarm system.  We know that locks are psychological.  And somehow, we're still able to assure ourselves, knowing full well that seven registered sex offenders live within two seconds of This Old House, that we are doing the right thing to raise a child in this weird world.

I think you can do more than just buy a gun and spray bullets in the general vicinity of your attacker.  I think you can take your optimism and your faith in humanity and spray it in your neighborhood.  Then set the alarm and hope for the best.

God protects fools and children.