Hmm…(Oct 5) (Keeping it real)
Can’t help but wonder what time of day it was that I posted on Oct. 5, because a terrible thing happened that day which I didn’t mention. I’ll probably use this space to go into it in more detail, because I’m finally ready to go public with this information.
Sometime during the day on Oct. 5, 2011, my son Will Jones entered my house and stole my laptop. Sometime after that, I don’t know just when, he sold it for $100. Fortunately it was password protected and I haven’t seen any evidence that anybody got past the password protection.
We had evicted Will from our home on Saturday, Oct. 1, due to his failure to pay rent, drug use, and other behaviors we had told him were unacceptable. The final straw was when my wife returned from a ride with her mother in her mother’s car to see Will pulling up in my wife’s car. No permission sought or given, he was out riding in her car. (No driver’s license either.)
My son has now been in juvenile detention, jail, drug rehab, and other programs for most of the last few years. He is now homeless, living in vacant houses around the neighborhood. When he got out of jail early this year, he basically talked his way out of jail and back home. Never again.
The laptop is really the last of it. It’s what it represents, as a marker of what he’s become, that is priceless. He can return to my presence when he brings me a new laptop, along with a receipt demonstrating that it was not stolen, and a testimonial from a reputable employer that the money was not obtained through criminal means.
I would prefer that he was in jail right now. He was on ten years’ probation when he was released from jail — he has certainly not lived up to the terms of his probation. The freeing moment for me came early on when I realized that it was not his probation officer’s job to protect me from Will’s predations. A laptop is a small price to pay for the unvarnished truth of what he really is — a predator, a thief, a user, a scumbag.
Of course it hurts to say that of my own son. Maybe the language will soften as time goes by, but the determination remains steely and sure: he will never talk his way into my trust again.
