I once sold a house to Randy Lilly. I had put a lot of work into it in three years there, including a shed in the back yard that I ran a zip line from to one of the trees. When the zip line came down, the shed was a few degrees out of plumb. Some of those kids were big.
So I was Randy’s first call when he had an issue with the house, either because I knew the house or because I’d been mayor recently.
I was at lunch at BWW, probably some big important political thing, but I answered the phone because it was a couple of digits away from being Deb’s office number and I’d rather talk to her than anybody else. But it wasn’t her, it was Randy, who had the office two doors away from her at BRCC and as it turned out the phone number two digits away.
His problem was that a woman had come to his house to tell him that 50 or 60 years before a person in the house had stillborn premature twins and they were so small that the family buried them in a quart Mason jar. Now this woman wanted to bring in a backhoe and find the remains and . . . do something.
Randy was freaked out about this for any number of reasons, including the fact he was too nice a guy to flat out tell the woman to go away and never darken his door again. I remember thinking that this sort of thing doesn’t happen to normal people, but I don’t remember if I was thinking about me or Randy. I promised him a solution, assuring him that with the sheer number of zoning regulations in the city, this woman’s exhumation plan had to violate one of them.
I called Community Development, then run by Stacey Turner, who was kind to me because even though I had been mayor, I hadn’t been a jerk about it. I’m not saying anybody else has been while mayor. Nobody specific anyway.
Stacey called me back to tell me that you can’t disturb human remains, and she cited chapter and verse, and some small piece of research told me that it had been a legal burial at the time it happened. That’s how I remember it now anyway, but I can’t promise I didn’t make up parts of it to bolster Randy’s case. He was grateful to me and, I’m certain, doleful when he had to tell the woman the law would not allow him to let her have her way.
Randy died recently, and adding insult to injury, the house is being renovated beyond all recognition. I'll miss him because he always had a story. They tore down my shed. Far as I know, the twins are still down there.