dateline.

The other night Angela and I were watching Dateline. It was the Friday edition. The episode was about this lady who murdered her husband and made her kids bury the body in the backyard. It decayed there for a couple of decades, virtually undisturbed (except by the predictable onslaught of maggots and other pests dutifully participating in the great miracle that is the circle of life) until the trigger-pulling mother was all blue hair, excess neck skin, sun spots and aged bones. By the time the truth came out, she had long been accepted by her neighbors as the kindly old woman on the block—a giver of cookies at Halloween time, a wrapper of shrubs with strands of only occasionally functional bulbs at Christmas time, a ready and willing fill-in babysitter for parents victimized by last minute cancellations, a frequent and patronizing customer of the many lemonade stands that over the years overcharged for poorly mixed and lukewarm juice. So you can imagine the shock of her neighbors when a forensics team could be seen excavating dirt-caked bones from the woman’s backyard. Predictably, a crowd formed along the perimeter of her property. Men and women gossiped and watched in awe the unearthing of a crime so unlikely that had anyone proposed just one day previous a theory halfway resembling its perpetration, the whole neighborhood would likely have responded with a unified and resounding scoff and together panned the conjecture as wildly far-fetched—less credible than even fictional murder mysteries. It just couldn't be so. To think of those brittle hands—the very same ten fingers that most summer nights had crocheted to the tune of a creaky rocking chair massaging the wood slats of a picturesque Idaho front porch—that their weakly metacarpals had once squeezed six chambers in the direction of the woman’s husband—well, it was almost too incongruous to believe. But it was so. And you know what this episode did to me? It made me sad. But not so much sad for the dead husband or the children forced to bury their step-father’s remains between the family dog’s doghouse and the withered old tool shed, or even for the kindly old woman sentenced to spend her final Halloweens and Christmases attempting to survive unwanted encounters with butch inmates behind the bars of an Idaho state women’s correctional facility. Mostly, I felt sad for myself. And for my wife. That on a Friday—an evening almost universally renowned as the quintessential evening for riotous merriment—we were home, watching Dateline.