Stories from the local townie hardware store owner.

The guy who owns the hardware store down the block from me is an old townie guy who's part Polish-American and a retired cop to boot.

The other month I was getting some stuff from him, and he started telling me stories about the old days.

First, he said, guns were always a problem, and G-d help you if you were out at midnight on New Year's Eve in a bad part of town like the neighborhood west of the city where he was always assigned, since people started popping guns and esp. firing at cops.

One year, he said, he and some cops drove down into a basement garage for patrol cars just around midnight, and someone started firing into the walls with semiautomatic weapons.

"Ten minutes or ten minutes after, we'd have been dead," he was like (meaning that if the guy had started firing earlier or later when the patrol car was on the street they would have died?).

He also talked about how the police force used to be a lot tighter.

"Drunks were taken care of back then," he was like, and explained that they were assigned to poorer black neighborhoods (since the police didn't care about those neighborhoods?).

Interestingly, his wife is immigrant Chinese.  He's taught her to make stuffed cabbage, and she's shocked at how much China has taken over from the U.S. for simple manufacturing, since back when she grew up in China, people would kill for American goods, since they thought Chinese-manufactured stuff was shit.