"Is he looking back?"

I haven’t been shot at in over 9 years. And I haven’t had a gun pointed at me in about 5, and that was by my wife, Lia, so it doesn’t count as an actual hostile act, even though the gun was loaded and had just seconds before been fired. Funny story. Ask me sometime.

That’s nine years of pretty smooth sailing – no attacks, no near misses or close calls outside of sports, and nothing criminal with the intent to harm . . . me. Or us. And that includes three years of living on the edge between great and not-so-great Los Angeles neighborhoods.

Lia was freaked out when we first moved into our last house in LA. In fact her very words upon seeing our last neighborhood for the first time were, “Oh Fuck no! I’m not living here.” But we did, and in the end she cried genuine tears of sadness when we left that house for the less threatening and far damper environs of Seattle.

Fact is we didn’t get our house at such a great price on our negotiating prowess alone. Fact is our basement has a low ceiling height. Fact is much of the electrical system is old. Fact is it’s poorly insulated. Fact is there’s so much new wiring and piping mixed with the old under the house it’s hard to tell what works and what doesn’t.

Fact is, it’s a beautiful house in a transitional neighborhood.

Lia never said it out loud, but the potential for the discussion was always there. It was the turbulence just before a wet runway landing where passengers make quick eye contact but don’t really say anything. And neither one of us wanted to be the first to truly question what was going on.

Lia did her homework, and quoted crime rates and economic stats like a pro. She still does as she now tracks the daily flux of Seattle home values. But she never outright says, “We shouldn’t be living here.” Again, I see our new place nestled in a great area. Compared to our last place, it’s safer (tho’ Lia disagrees), and has even fewer signs of potential risk. And it’s a gated community compared to where I spent much of my teen years and early twenties.

Lia's on guard. She walked in to the house recently and walked out, wide eyed saying, "I smell cologne in there. Go in and see who's in there." It turned out to be a candle I'd pulled from a box. That says volumes about how she feels.

But every thing's been going along swimmingly. (I borrowed that from Ann Coulter. That’s how she once summarized how things are going in Afghanistan.) We swam to the store one day last week, IKEA maybe, and on the swim home and just around the corner from our house we came across three police cars parked akimbo in the middle of the street. It didn’t startle me. Cop cars in Seattle are baby blue and white, not the fear-inducing black and white you see in Los Angeles. Genetically my Los Angeles Mexican half is coded to recognize black and white as a bad situation about to get worse. But blue and white? It didn’t click.

Lia saw the guns right away. She saw the cops hiding behind trees and the dudes kneeling with their hands in the air. The blue and white so totally threw me off that I was lost. I was thinking maybe cat in a tree, or spilled popcorn in the street or anything not including cops, guns and bad guys. I turned left and parked in front of our house before retrospect started setting in. Then I saw it all as Lia filled in the blanks.

But she wasn’t freaking out. Why not? I was waiting for it, more concerned about her reaction than what we’d just seen. That was a rough bump too serious to ignore. This was screaming-passenger, dropping-oxygen-masks and crash position stuff, and still Lia was more concerned about getting the facts of what she’d just seen straight, than any reactive argument she could be leveraging against me, because for sure, cops, guns and bad guys would naturally fall under the category of Things Anthony Brings To The Table.

I don’t know how long it was until we spoke about it, but the consensus was, ‘bring on the cops.’ And since then we’ve noticed a real presence of the blue and white in our neighborhood. I don’t think a trip home goes by without cop sightings within a half-mile of our street.

Last night right at dusk, a guy came running around the corner, and bolted down the sidewalk across the street. I’ve seen that run before. It was panic. The Mp3 player or cell phone in his hand glowed brightly and streaked in the air like a psychedelic iPod ad. He had on a gray jacket with a hood, and baggy jeans. No cleats or numbers on his back. Lia and I again made brief eye contact as he ran past.

“Is he looking behind him?” Lia asked. “Is he looking back?”

###

Garfield High School is around the corner from us. I’m told it’s the second best school in Seattle behind Roosevelt. And it’s currently undergoing a major renovation. That, in my opinion, is the barometer for what’s to come. Sinking millions into a school is more than ripping out asbestos and replacing drinking fountains. It’s gambling, forecasting that the school will have the community behind it, a community with behaved kids, watchful eyes and money to invest in trumpets and science projects and booster clubs. And real estate.

Try getting New York to sink millions into renovating a Bronx high school in a ramshackle part of the borough, and see the resistance you get from the future. Nobody cares about falling ceiling tiles, or busted plumbing, or broken radiators because without the power of money in the community, there’s no real reason to invest, and even less leverage to force it.

Likewise, take a high school in a good neighborhood, or even a transitional neighborhood people are betting on at the real estate tables, and try running it into the ground. Let a cracked window go unattended, or a mysterious mold grow, and see what sort of outrage ensues.

I suspect our neighborhood is going to rise up a great deal, and quickly. No doubt there are a lot of people at the table leaning on the leather rails over the green felt - home owners looking to cash in and the Realtors circling overhead, and tax assessors, and proud mothers and fathers chasing the American dream, and Whole Foods and Trader Joe's and numerous restaurant entrepreneurs, and gardeners, and ice cream men looking to bump a single cone from $1.50 to $3, and flippers waiting for the market to heat up again, and me and Lia who most recently threw the dice – we’re all looking for sevens.

Lia is not so sure.

I’m not worried. It’s been nine long years.