THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 21, 1996 TAG: 9601180049
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: REAL MOMENTS
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 105 lines
``If any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.'' Exodus 21:23-25
``Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you, That ye shall resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.'' Matthew 5:38-39
Lying awake, night after night, I could remember only fragments of those verses. I had to look them up under light of day to get them right. They are in conflict, and I'm not sure which one to follow.
They are biblical lessons on revenge, and revenge has been heavy on my mind. Somebody is stealing my firewood, and it is making me angry. In fact, it is driving me crazy.
I have drifted off to sleep while devising the most frightening, Rambo-esque booby traps. I have found myself at my desk, in idle moments, working out the circuitry for a homemade log-theft alarm system, built of common household objects and a 9-volt battery. I am the Martha Stewart of vengeance.
It started in autumn, with the first real cold snap. A couple of logs at a time, the humble pile of firewood beside my garage began to shrink. I thought it was my imagination. Just to be sure, I stacked the logs in a way that would tell me if they'd been tampered with.
A couple of days later, the evidence was clear: Somebody was woodjacking me. Worse, they were taking the oak and leaving the pine.
Thus began a conflict that has dogged me all winter. How should I react? The enlightened side of me says this: ``Look, you've lost about $5 worth of wood, half what you'd spend on one night's Chinese takeout. Forget it. It's not worth the time spent worrying about it.''
The darker side - and mine can be black as the river Styx - says this: ``Don't be a sucker. It's your wood, paid for with your hard-earned money, and nobody has a right to just come and take it.''
At night, the dark side wins. I imagine the wood thief sitting in front of a crackling fire, perhaps with a lover, enjoying the mesmerizing licks of flame. And he is chuckling to himself about the fool across the way whose firewood is free for the taking. I am the cedar-log cuckold.
And I react as such, with dark fantasies of vengeance. I could drill out a log and pack in a small bit of gunpowder, then carefully cover over the hole with putty and shavings. Sort of like Albert Belle corking his bat, but with brutal intent. Yes, that will teach him. No, bad idea. Somebody could get hurt, I could burn somebody's home to cinders. Can't do that.
Fishhooks. Yes, I could take a pair of pliers and wedge some treble-hooks into the grain of one or two logs, leaving the thief with some nasty puncture wounds. No, can't do that either. I have a weakness: All my life, I have been incapable of inflicting pain. As a kid, it left me at a true disadvantage in fistfights.
One night, after a dusting of snow, there were footprints. I couldn't track them because the snow didn't cover all the driveway. The prints came up to my woodpile and then doubled back. Logs were missing.
I stood there in a shifting late-night wind, staring at the prints, wondering what Holmes would make of them. Sherlock Holmes would look at these markings in the snow and determine that the thief was left-handed, smoked a briar pipe, wore a double-breasted tweed jacket and had just returned from India.
All I could tell was the thief has feet bigger than mine.
As the woodpile shrinks, my scheming becomes more clever, more intricate. I could loop fishing line around a couple of logs, I reasoned one night, then rig the line to a horn from an old smoke alarm. I pictured myself alone at night in my garage, like the Unabomber, hunched over the workbench, carefully soldering the trip-wire. I am the cunning guerrilla Green Beret, the poet-warrior setting a snare for the vicious Vietcong log-napper.
I am clearly losing my mind.
Or so I thought, until I started telling this tale to friends. Every one of them had a story of loss and vengeance. One spoke of how she'd lovingly crafted a rock garden around some shrubs in her front yard. Somebody stole the rocks. Another had to quit putting potted plants on his porch. Somebody kept stealing them.
Yet another locked immediately onto my Walter Mitty dreams of revenge. He began to pencil out a schematic of a booby trap made of a battery, a couple of tin pie-plates and a model-rocket engine. Guaranteed, he said, to throw off a six-foot sheet of flame.
I felt somewhat better knowing that I am not alone. We are legion, those of us who've lost patience with people who believe that if they see something they want, they have a right to take it. And it is comforting to know I'm not the only one who dreams of evening the score.
There is one more biblical caution on vengeance - Romans 12:19, the most famous one, which most of you remembered immediately: ``Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.''
Easy for Him to say. He was gifted with an unworldly reservoir of forgiveness and forbearance. I'm more an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye kind of guy. So tonight, on my way home, I'm stopping at the hobby shop to have a look at those model-rocket engines. ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN COLOR PHOTOS/The Virginian-Pilot
TAMARA VONINSKI/FILE
No, Dawne Brooks isn't THIS skinny. It's a computer-generated
effect. But she did manage to shed 34 pounds - more than any other
Fitness Quest participant. by CNB