Perhaps Not So Safe After All

Having lived in lily-white, oh-so-gentrified Woodley Park for several years now, I've developed a certain level of complacency regarding the safety of my neighborhood. It's rare that I feel unsafe walking the streets alone at night and I would certainly never think that anyone would deliberately do harm to my home or my possessions. This is not to say that I write to you from a position of great material wealth. As I've stated before, I'm merely a financially humble writer who happened to have lucked-out by finding a really inexpensive group living situation in a nice neighborhood. For that I am grateful. Having witnessed some truly horrible things happen to friends living in less-safe areas of the city in the recent past, I constantly marvel at my good fortune to live where I do. Yeah, our house is a little tattered and old but there's a roof over our heads and the only time somebody unwelcome ever intruded was a while back when somebody forgot to lock the door and a drunk ex-paramour stumbled in looking for a safe place to crash for the night.

Yet recently, it seems that we cannot have UPS packages delivered to our door without them go missing. Last week my mother sent me a box of stuff she no longer wanted that she thought I could make use of. The contents of the box totaled about 600 dollars in value. I didn't need them, but was looking forward to having them. It should have arrived by now. She had the package tracked and according to UPS, it was already delivered.

I wrote my roommates to make sure none of them had brought it in and I had somehow overlooked it. One of them responded to say that a similar thing happened to him about a month ago. Now that I think about it, I clearly remember seeing a car parked on the street outside our house last week or the week before with one of its windows smashed in.

Until today I have definitely taken the relative safety of my neighborhood for granted. In fact, I have probably tested the limits of our comparative lack of crime for far too long. This is not to say that I am claiming that Woodley Park is experiencing some sort of terrible crime wave, nor do I want to sound like some uptight yuppie bemoaning the theft of her pottery barn delivery. I know I am lucky to live where I live. I realize that I still have it pretty good.

But let this be a lesson to all of us. Sometimes the beauty and calm of a neighborhood can imbue its residents with a false sense of security.

From now on, I'm having all my packages sent to my work address. And hopefully whoever has my box truly needed it more than I did.