War and Peace

Like Uncle Ken said, it depends on how you define war but, if you include things like tribal conflicts and feudalism, most of the human occupied world has been at war for most of recorded history. That doesn't mean that every village and hamlet was in the thick of it all the time. Decades or even centuries might go by between local battles, lulling the occupants of a particular settlement into a false sense of security but, sooner or later, somebody comes along and trashes the place. I looked up "the sack of Rome" once and found that Rome had been sacked multiple times in its history I forget how many times, but it was certainly more than once or twice. I read once in National Geographic that, when they dig down under Rome to install a pipeline or excavate the foundation for a large building, work frequently has to be halted so the archaeologists can come in and check out some ancient artifacts that have been long buried under war ruble that had been built over and forgotten. The city of Ur, in the Biblical land of the Chaldeans (now Iraq) has been thoroughly excavated and found to have been built over war ruins eight or nine times, maybe more. Last I heard they were still digging in expectation of finding more layers. Tel Aviv, the capitol of modern Israel, is like that too. There are lots of other places in Israel whose names begin with "Tel", which means a man-made mountain built from multiple layers of war ruble.

More primitive cultures in North America and on some tropical islands built with wood and animal hides instead of brick and stone, so there's no telling how many times their settlements have been destroyed by war or conflict. North American Indians were generally nomadic, so the survivors of a battle probably just moved on and started all over again rather than rebuilding on the same site. Some notable exceptions were the cliff dwellings that we talked about, and the impressive earthen mounds found in the southeastern U.S. In those cases, while the structures survived, their builders did not, and nobody knows what became of them.

I have never heard of people leaving their clothes in a laundromat overnight. My hypothetical wife was employed in one for a time, and she told me they had a posted rule that any load left unattended could be removed by anybody who was waiting to use the machine. I suppose the laundry facility is Uncle Ken's building is not exactly a laundromat because it's not open to the general public. Nevertheless, it might not be a bad idea to bring the issue up at a owner's/ tenant's meeting and see if it would be possible to institute a similar rule there.

I didn't exactly "dabble in sin" at the age of 11, I just went kind of goofy and did some stupid things. Looking back on it, the onset of puberty probably had something to do with it. I also fell into association with some other goofy people, one of which was my own cousin who, last I heard, was in some kind of prison or mental institution. Then there were those kids that showed up in Sawyer after being kicked out of St. Gall's Catholic School. Well, I don't know if they were kicked out, flunked out, or dropped out, but they landed in Sawyer and were a bad influence on our whole sixth grade class. I eventually learned to ignore such bad influences, resolved puberty by taking matters into my own hands, and have been self reliant ever since.