When I get the newspaper from my hometown, it takes all of about five minutes (or less) to look through. You check out the latest gossip (they really do have that section), the obituaries, and then you skim to see if there were any babies born to anyone you know. You then realize everyone having babies were most likely in the Third Grade when you left the town, so you then feel really old.

The town I grew up in had/has a population of around 400 people. We have a blinking stoplight. I was generally late to school on account of Kenny driving his tractor down the oil road (yes, OIL ROAD), or Emily's chickens were out and I didn't want mashed up chickens in my car grill. When we went out to lunch after church, we went to the Café. When I'd help dad on the weekend's by sitting with him for endless hours bidding and buying cattle, we'd have lunch at the Sale Barn. I stomped through shit for the majority of my childhood. When my dad died years later, the town shut down, the churches weren't big enough, and we had 200 casseroles at our house before noon. It's just the way it is out there.

I opened the mailbox the other day, saw the paper, and the headline read: "MASKED GUNMAN FOUND IN LOCAL HOME!" across the front page.

.... THE HELL ????I honestly checked to see if I had the right paper.

I read the story and knew the family. In fact, I remember babysitting their two boys. This woman had been outside, heard her dog barking at something, went to investigate, found a 'masked man with gun' in her bedroom, and he pointed the gun at her. She ran outside. He ran after her. She screamed for him to get away, and eventually, he ran off.
The town went into lockdown. Businesses closed up and the schools were locked down. Parents were told to come get their children, but had to show proper identification or they wouldn't release them. A neighbor offered his airplane to do an aerial search. The shit was happening here, folks.

They eventually found him later that night, and in the process, busted his friend for drugs.

But I got to thinking - all of this wasn't THAT much of a surprise. This is about par for the course in my hometown. Every so often, we have crap that happens, and it puts us on the map - rather unwillingly.

1. When I went home last year for my 10 year class reunion, some guy had busted into someone else's house. He was obviously a little out there (drugs, they think) - and was wielding a knife. When he wouldn't put the knife down and was threatening the lives of some folks, they shot him. There were helicopters from DENVER flying over our town. My high school classmate was a deputy then, and he saw the dead body. That night at the reunion, he wasn't doing too well. This just doesn't happen, you know? We get people who speed through town, not expecting Johnny Law to be there.

2. When I was in high school, my classmate's parents found a guy in their house. He was naked and bleeding. The story was that he was a drifter that had come off the highway, and when the noon town whistle went off, he freaked. How he ended up naked, I don't remember. I do remember that he was bleeding from trying to jump through their dining room window.

3. When I was in elementary school, I remember standing with my dad and brother in our kitchen. It was a Saturday morning. My mom had gone into town to pick up donuts, and we had the television on. Cartoons, and all. The next thing we know, there is breaking news and our donut shop in the backdrop for the reporter. My dad scrambles to turn up the television, and this is when the camera pans over to my mother, in her red feed jacket (yes, FEED JACKET) and she looks quite bewildered and puzzled, holding a big box of donuts. Turns out ... some NEIGHBORS of ours - a father and son - (living a mile or two away) had been killing people. A lot of people. They'd been knocking off illegal immigrant/transient folks. They'd go to Denver, pick them up, bus them out, have them do some manual labor, and instead of paying them, they'd kill them. They'd been doing this for a while, apparently. Somewhere in there, one of them had killed a truck driver and it ended up getting back to the police. I don't remember the whole story now, except that when they put the son away, he tried to arrange to have a helicopter flown in to the prison so he and his girlfriend could fly to Mexico and assume the identity of an American family there. That didn't work out so well. And the father? He got off after a while and married the chiropractor's ex-wife.

Listen very closely: SMALL TOWNS ARE NOT THAT BORING. We might not get the newest movie releases for a good ... six months ... but dammit, we have some drama.

(And, apparently, a great Bake Sale coming up, too.)