In Trouble With The Law

It’s true, though known by few, that I have created various incidents in which The Law has had to take notice and reprimand me.

Incident #1.

I’m running along the boardwalk with my sisters, vampire hunting…

Yes, you read me right: Vampire Hunting.

…when suddenly this officer steps out of nowhere and asks us gruffly what we’re doing.

Awkward!

“Um, walking,” I say.

It was, after all, a boardwalk. People walk on these things, traditionally. Of course, we’d been running.

I’d had no idea up until that moment that there is a certain hour by which you are not supposed to be out walking on the boardwalk if you are under eighteen.

“I’m twenty,” I explain.

“Can I see some identification?” he asks.

“I don’t have any?” It wasn’t a question, really, but I was embarrassed. I always looked younger than I was, and I’m quite certain the vampire hunting after midnight didn’t aid my cause.

He was apparently disgruntled that not only was I running around the boardwalk after hours, but that I’d also brought my little sisters along.

It seemed a moot point to explain that it had all been their idea in the first place, or that I had gotten to the point where I seldom thought of them as being all that much younger than me. We’d been through a hellish childhood together, and were more like comrades, veterans of an unjustified, physically and emotionally ravaging war in which we had been drafted without our consent. If my sisters  wanted to blow off a little steam hunting vampires, I found it pretty harmless.

The officer disagreed. He gave me the “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, dragging these poor children out after dark,” speech, adding, “It’s dangerous out here at night!” as if we hadn’t noticed.

After all, the place was crawling with vampires.

 

Incident #2.

 

I wasn’t directly responsible for this one…

Hell, I wasn’t directly responsible for the last one, but some years later, when my second-youngest sister was back in town visiting from college, she and her boyfriend (friend at the time? Husband now, so time is playing tricks on my memory) wanted to demonstrate for us their newly acquired fencing skills. They’d met in a fencing class, which we all thought was cool as hell, so we bundled into the car and drove to the empty parking lot behind/beside Guardian Angel’s Church.  It was kind of ironic. Growing up, people at school would have a disagreement and then yell, “Guardian Angels! Three O’clock!” and then there’d be a fight in this same parking lot. I wonder if they still do that.

The fencing was fantastic – the masks, the poses, the slender blades poised before the attack. They weren’t especially good at it yet, but Princess Bride quotes abounded.

I kind of noticed out of the corner of my eye that the people in the house across the street were peering out at us from behind their curtains. Their lights went out just as the police arrived.

As you can imagine, we had some difficulty justifying our deeds to skeptical officers who more or less told us the same things that we’d heard when we were out vampire hunting.

I was beginning to see a pattern, sure.

 

Incident #3.

 

By this time, I’m married and have three stepchildren at the age of twenty-one. Sheepish at not going to college as I had promised my mother, I eventually came to commute back and forth from Ferris State University to the dusty, depressing little neighborhood where I now lived. I was taking “nontraditional student” to whole new levels.

It was spring, and I have a tendency to step a little too hard on the gas in nice weather when a good song is on. Additionally, I was going to be late for parent-teacher conferences if I didn’t go a little bit faster.

I saw a police car swing out from a corner and its lights flashed on.

Anxiously, I eyed it from my rearview window and thought, “They must mean someone else!”

Not quite sure when I realized it was me they were after, but I pulled over immediately and opened my dashboard. There had to be something in there that they’d want to see. I’d seen enough tv shows to figure that much out…

When I rolled down my window, the officer ordered me to close my dash and told me crossly, “How am I to know if you don’t have a gun in there or something? Never reach into your dashboard when you’ve been stopped!”

“Sorry,” I said nervously, “I’ve never been stopped before.”

The officer asked for my license and registration. I wasn’t entirely certain what a registration looked like, but figured it must be in my dashboard somewhere…

“Uh, can I open my dash now?”

He nodded impatiently….

“That’s your proof of insurance.”

“Oh.”

More digging.

“Is this it?”

Without a word, he took it and went back to his car.

I looked at my watch and thought, “I’ll never make it to that conference on time now!”

The officer returned and handed me my paperwork. “You were going pretty fast there – is there a fire?”

I smiled sheepishly. “I’m late for parent-teacher conferences.”

The officer smiled back. “Oh,” he said, “I know how that is. I’ve got kids myself. You slow down and pay attention to your speedometer next time, all right?”

I agreed, and to my relief he left me to my own devices without giving me a ticket.

 

Incident #4.

 

I was on my way home from a day at the university. They were long days back then – I’d squeeze all my undergraduate courses into two days a week so that I could be home the other days  (a woman’s place was really supposed to be in the home, my in-laws told me), leaving me in back-to-back classes from eight o’clock in the morning to nine o’clock at night. I would strain my tired eyes wide and do a cautious sweep of the road beyond my headlights, hoping not to sight any deer bounding into my line of vision.

 I hadn’t gotten my license too long ago, as for the longest time I was irrationally afraid of accidently killing another person with my weak driving skills. I found I didn’t care for driving in the dark. My night vision didn’t strike me as being very good. I would turn on my brights as often as possible, trying to keep track of whether or not I had them on as other traffic approached. My drive was long and winding and went through woods and alongside lakes, and I could never understand why so many people were out that time of night in the middle of nowhere.

At this point I came behind perhaps the slowest vehicle it has ever been my curse to be trapped following. The speed limit was forty – this joker was going about twenty-five, even though we were passing a lake and there were no deer in sight. I had to brake to avoid hitting him, and decided to simply pass him by. After all, there were no approaching headlights. I turned off my brights as I passed, trying to spare them a blinding.

It was a police car.

Their lights went on, and I had to stop where I was just beyond them because the road was too narrow for me to pull to any side.

An officer stuck a flashlight in at me and asked heavily, “Do you have any idea why I’m stopping you?”

Oh. Lovely. He wanted to make it into a little quiz to see if I was paying attention.

“Um, no – I wasn’t speeding, was I?”

“You have NO IDEA what you did, then?” he asked skeptically.

Mute at his disbelief, I shook my head. I’m a reformed liar like other people are reformed alcoholics. When we moved three times when I was twelve, I had taken to reinventing myself at every new school, but I’d long since straightened up my act, and was surprised that it would even occur to him that I was pretending not to know what I had done.

“You didn’t just flash me with your brights?” he demanded angrily.

My response?

“People deliberately DO that?!”

Luckily, this amused him.

He advised me to pay more attention to what I was doing next time, and did not give me a ticket.

I was beginning to see a pattern developing here.

 

Incident #5.

 

I was driving in Ludington with my youngest stepdaughter in the passenger seat, taking her back to her mother’s house. It was a sunny day and a good song was on the radio.

We turned onto Washington Avenue, where I believe I was supposed to be going twenty-five miles an hour, and we were singing along to the radio when I saw an officer swing around the corner with siren blaring.

“Is that for me?” I asked incredulously.

“Pull over!” she yelped.

The officer, strikingly attractive, came to my open window and asked, “Do you know what you were doing wrong?”

I wondered absently if this game were in their special police handbook.

“Probably speeding,” I said glumly.

“Ma’am, I need your license and proof of insurance.”

I opened the dash with a sheepish smile in his direction, glancing at where the red plastic sleeve containing my proof of insurance lay pushed against the back of the glove box. Still looking at the officer, I reached in and then handed him –

A spare pad that I kept in the glove box in case of a feminine hygiene emergency.

The corner of his mouth twitched.

Face burning, I took back the pad and reached again for the proof of insurance. I almost grabbed another one, so my stepdaughter hastily snatched up the red sleeve and handed it to me. Giggling.

I passed it to the officer, who took it between his thumb and forefinger and carried it back to his car.

Alone for a moment, we looked at each other and laughed hysterically.

I’m not sure how we managed it, but we had straight faces when the officer returned and wrote me a ticket for going sixty in a 25-mile-per-hour zone.

That wasn’t so funny.

 

Incident #6.

 

I’m thirty-two by this time, and in the interim since my last run-in with an officer, the closest I’ve come to facing The Law was the man who stood beside the door in divorce court.

I’m late getting my kids back to my ex-husband’s house and driving as if I’m actually looking forward to a lecture from him.

It’s a beautiful sunny day, and I’m singing along to the children’s tape I have inserted in my old Ford Taurus.

I see the officer’s lights before I hear the sirens. Pulling over, I explain to my children that I must have been driving too fast, which is against the law, so now a police officer is coming to talk to me…

I roll down the window.

Before the officer asks me if I know what I did wrong, my son bursts into tears and wails, “Please don’t take my mommy to jail!”

The officer stares at him, then looks helplessly at me.

“Officer,” I ask anxioulsy, “Before you give me a ticket, can you please explain to my little boy here that I’m not going to jail?”

“Kid, I’m not sending your mommy to jail,” the officer explains gruffly, “I just don’t like it when she drives her car so fast. It’s dangerous for you and for the other drivers on the road.”

Turning to me, he says with a sudden smile, “Just watch that speedometer, will ya?”

I promise him that I will, thinking that my son could not have gotten hysterical at a better moment. I mean, even if I had trained him to do that, it’s unlikely he could have pulled it off so effectively.

Of course, for three years afterward my children never get into the car with me without asking anxiously if maybe I’m going too fast, even when I’m not.

 

Incident #7.

 

Well, it cannot be said of me that I don’t learn from my mistakes. I never got stopped for speeding again.

After I went back to college to finish my teaching degree, I was at the mercy of the campus police. As there is a law enforcement program at Ferris State University, the police are everywhere, and very eager to ticket someone.

I had gone out to run an errand, and on my way home the sun was readying itself to set.

I was pulled over for not remembering to turn my lights on.

The lady in uniform was large and angry.

I reached into my dashboard for my proof of insurance, but felt only a bunched up pile of something soft. Pulling it out, I recognized the green and white pattern of my insurance company scattered among the neat little indented circle of a mouse’s nest.

I looked out at the lady and asked tentatively, “ Officer, would you believe that a mouse ate my insurance?”

She stared darkly at me for a moment, then grunted, “You can’t make that crap up. All right, you go back home and get a copy of that insurance and make sure it’s in your car the next time you go out.”

I turned on my lights and drove home.