Fight or flight

So here's the whole story according to my sister. My parents didn't exactly have the best vacation ever.

Sometime during the middle of last week, when the sun was setting on Rio de Janeiro, when the upbeat cacophony of the city calmed into a more soothing din, my dad indulged himself in taking pictures of my mom laying on the beach. I wasn't there, of course, but fifty bucks says he was trying to get fresh with her.

Before they left on the trip, my dad spent an entire afternoon telling me about how visiting Rio had long been a childhood dream of his. He dreamt of beautiful women, of stunning paradise, of standing in the middle of hot beaches along the bottom edges of monolithic morros. He told me he wished he had gone during his young bachelor years, but then again, he said, everything is worth waiting your entire life for if you get to do it with the one you truly love.

I didn't think I'd ever forget the imagery offered by my dad as he described his vision of Rio, just as I don't think I'll forget the picture painted by my sister as she continued on with the story.

Because, apparently, as my dad sat there on the beach, asking my mom to smile for the camera as the sun sank into the horizon behind her, two Brazilian teenagers -- one with a knife -- attacked him.

They pushed and grabbed and clawed their way into my dad's back pocket. My mom tried punching one of them on the arm, but it did nothing. And when my dad tried reasoning with them, the men only got more aggressive.

While this was all happening, a group of kids playing volleyball about a stone's throw away ignored them. As my mom collapsed into the sand and cried for help, no one even flinched. After only a couple minutes of tussling, the men left with my dad's wallet full of credit cards and a driver's license.

This was the Rio de Janeiro that my dad had not dreamed about.

My sister was telling me all of this over the phone, about how our mom had blurted out the entire story during dinner against our dad's wishes. Concerned about how we would react, my dad wanted to keep this story from us; he had even asked my mom to send us cheerful emails while they were there so we wouldn't worry about anything.

"I'm telling you all this so that when Mom and Dad talk to you about it, you won't get all worked up," my sister told me. "You should have seen Mom earlier. She was shaking. She's still really upset. She can't let it go."

It was the way that Lynn worded everything that got to me. Things like "they pinned Daddy's shoulders down" and "Mom was so scared" and "they kept screaming at Daddy." I thought about my parents and how small and old and gentle they are. I thought about how everyone on the beach turned their backs. I thought about the time I got mugged, walking home from a bar in Champaign.

Gritting my teeth so it hurt, I said, "Too bad I wasn't there. I would have popped one of those fuckers really hard on the jaw. See how he likes it."

"Stop that!" my sister snapped, but I couldn't. What my sister didn't get was how degrading being mugged could be. It's not about money, it's about pride. It's about being so scared and helpless that you're stripped of your humanity, making you feel as low as even the muggers themselves. After that night in Champaign a few years ago I was so filled with anger that for weeks, I would purposely walk through back alleys on the way home from bars, clearing my throat loudly, hoping that a mugger would jump out in front of me so that I could do something satisfying, like dislocate his elbow or bash his face in.

(See also: "Unsweet Justice").

Disappointed in my attitude, my sister told me I was just like Mom and threatened to hang up if I continued my crazed vigilante act, so I tried to change the subject a bit. "So..." I began, not sure what else I wanted to talk about. "Did Mom and Dad show you any cool pics of Rio?"

"No. Those men took the camera too."

My blood boiled. It was a $1300 digital camera my Dad bought as a Christmas present to himself a couple years ago.

...

I could have been raging from now until eternity, but then I thought about a couple things.

First, I thought about something my buddy Roy said to me last night when I was intimating that we should fight crime together: "You can't reduce every confrontation in life to just fight or flight."

Second, I thought about the rest of the story as told by my sister, about how my parents' traumatic experience in Brazil was followed by frustration after frustration in Miami because of missed flights. My mom just wanted the nightmare to all be over, and my dad noticed these two ladies crying hysterically because they had also missed their flight.

He looked at my mom, then stared at those two ladies, then looked at my mom again, knowing how badly she wanted to get the fuck out of there and just go home. So my dad did what any hero would do: he rented a car and drove for 18 hours straight to Chicago without any rest at all.

My sister told me how proud she was of our dad for being so calm and composed throughout everything, for doing his best to comfort our mom, and the more I thought about it, the more I wished I was as good a man as he is.

...

I called my mom about an hour ago and told her that Lynn told me everything. I told her I loved her, then teased her about the money she's wasted on self-defense classes, then told her that I'm glad she's safe, although now I have that pesky Mother's Day gift to worry about again.

My mom laughed loudly, while I found myself wishing that my levity was completely sincere.