DAYTON, Ohio -- On Thanksgiving Day, I refused to let anyone take my picture. Bad hair day, I pleaded.
Lucky for me, no one called the cops.Lucky for all of us, the family of James Lawson's new girlfriend did. Grandma got suspicious over Lawson's vehement refusal to be videotaped when he came for Thanksgiving dinner in Indiana. The folks didn't know him well enough to grant the grace of a bad hair day.
Until Saturday, with the news of the fugitive's capture -- essentially at the hands of a nosy grandmother -- Lawson's case was hardly one that inspired faith in the family. His mother, Ellen Kay Peck of Middletown, has pleaded guilty to helping bury the body parts of the victim, Cheryl Ann Durkin.
Peck's gruesome act -- burying body parts that had been cut up with a power saw -- showed family loyalty at its worst.
Grandma's hunch shows family loyalty at its aggressive, intrusive, buttinsky best. We don't know anything about her yet, but we all know grandmas and grandpas, moms and dads, aunts and uncles like her. We chafe at their overprotective love -- and we'd be forlorn without it.
Remember being in high school and wondering, "What gives them the right to ask what time I'm coming in? What concern is it of theirs if I've done my homework or not?" You couldn't wait for the day when your life was nobody's business but your own.
Twenty years or so later, it hits you: That day never came. Mom still calls the second you're scheduled to come home from a trip. She knows you're pregnant before you do. She reminds you when it's time to renew your license plates. She critiques your social schedule when she considers it overbooked.
Most families act as a second skin that protects us from the evil in the world. Ellen Kay Peck inverted that sacred trust, breaking the law to protect her son.
Most families also serve as superego, a far better enforcer of conscience than any revised code. Cover up for a crime? You're lucky if they give you slack for missing Sunday dinner.
So Peck's is a "What is this world coming to?" crime. What kind of mother would protect her son by leaving others in danger? (Lawson did not return her devotion, staying on the lam after authorities slapped his mother with $1 million bail.)
How reassuring, then, that this story also offers an example of a family working the way it should. Grandma became suspicious of new boyfriend. She was nosy enough to find out that boyfriend had a Middletown connection, and that's what she told Indiana State Police when she called the next day.
She didn't discreetly look the other way. She did what was necessary to protect her granddaughter. She did what was right.
Lawson's skittish reaction to the camcorder reveals how little he understood this kind of family. It was his suspicion of normal family rituals, ironically, that tripped him up.
Three cheers for grandma, and for all those who care about us even when it would be more convenient if they didn't.
Suppose she had called her granddaughter. Suppose her granddaughter had said, "Mind your own business."
I can picture her stout reply: "I am."
Mary McCarty writes for the Dayton Daily News, Dayton, Ohio. New York Times News Service