The large cement gargoyle that stood right beside my front door in Savannah is gone.

This from my mother, who, along with my father and their good friends, has been in Savannah this week doing some needed work on my house to get it ready to, hopefully, put up for sale.

I’m not surprised–frankly, I’d be shocked if it was still there; I was always a little amazed it didn’t disappear when I lived there, and I chalk up its continued presence mostly to Bishop’s ferocious bark–but I’m disgusted. People in Savannah* will walk away with anything that isn’t nailed down; at the cottage I lived in when I first moved there, this included some pillows that I had unsuccessfully tried to cleanse of mashed-up cat litter, and had placed on the porch to dry before tossing into the Dumpster. Despite the crust of gooey litter and the stench of pee, they grew legs during the night.

I don’t know how I would have gotten the gargoyle out of Savannah. It was heavy, probably more than 50 pounds, so I wouldn’t have been able to take it on an airplane. But even so, it was my gargoyle, on my property, and who in the world steals a gargoyle and why?!

Over the years my fascination with Savannah devolved into a deep, visceral hatred. This kind of thing is one of the reasons. (Others include the “we don’t have a crime problem; we have a crime perception problem” BS the mayor was peddling after spending hundreds of thousands on a task force to research crime, rather than, say, using that money to pay police officers competitive salaries so the PD could fill some of the 60 positions they had open at the time.)

*I know there’s crime everywhere. But I lived in bad neighborhoods before moving to Savannah, and I never heard weekly gunshots anywhere else, had things stolen off my property, had break-ins, had a friend mugged in the mall parking lot in the middle of the afternoon, or even thought twice about walking around alone after dark. I maintain, and I am not alone, that Savannah fosters its own unique breed of corruption and rot. In some ways it’s similar to New Orleans, except Savannah whitewashes the problems much more than NOLA can or does, and, at least in my experience, offers far less by way of compensation.