What goes up

Happy new year everybody!

Have I said recently how much we enjoy living in Oak Cliff? We live on a great street with friendly neighbors who watch out for us. There’s a lot of culture in the area, good restaurants, and it’s a pretty easy commute to work. (This paragraph has been inserted here before I get to the real story so that Mom won’t freak out about our neighborhood.)

The past couple of days Chel and I have been a little sick. Nothing that some Sudafed and OJ hasn’t been able to handle so far, but it kept us from going to Little Mom’s to ring in the new year last night. So when midnight rolled around and Chel was asleep in the bed and I had fallen asleep on the couch watching a Mavs game, I was glad that I had seen a story on TV warning Dallasites about random gunfire on New Year’s Eve.

About that culture in our neighborhood — apparently a tradition among one of the cultures in Oak Cliff is to fire guns in the air when the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s. While peacefully snoozing on the couch with Sinatra on my lap, I was awakened by the sound of a few faint “pops” in the distance. Followed by a few more pops. Followed by something that sounded like a few folks had some semi-automatic weapons or machine guns tucked away (legally, I’m sure) for just this occassion. The popping in the distance continued for a good 45 minutes or so. It was kind of a little open-air symphony of gunfire. Perhaps it was the Oak Cliff Pops? (Get it! Har har.)

While I was a bit nervous that we had left the Solstice parked in the driveway after making another OJ run — falling bullets and cloth tops don’t mix, after all — I decided against going outside to move the car into the garage. I got off the couch, made sure the alarm was set, took a Sudafed, and crawled into bed. After all, the news told me that the police had established a zero-tolerance policy against firing machine guns in the air. It sounded like it was really working.

Now that the first day of 2007 has dawned with no damage to the Solstice top and our sore throats feeling a little better, here’s hoping for a blessed, healthy, happy, gunfire-free new year for all!