THE POLICEMAN’S LOT IS NOT A HAPPY ONE / THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE / Gilbert & Sullivan

                                                           A general take on The Thin Blue Line

   

I have had varied experience with the police.  From big city cops to small town marshals.  Some individual cops are great and others are not so great.  Just like all people.  They have families and mortgages and braces for their daughter’s teeth to worry about.  They are called to walk into some of the most unbelievable carnage imaginable.  Babies that are put into the clothes dryer.  Crackheads that take an axe to their grandmothers and cannot tell you why.  I have been in on some of this myself.  You don’t sleep well after one of those evenings.  Their job can be dehumanizing and can dehumanize them.  Some of my experiences with them have been great and some not so great, but all memorable.

Cops are sworn to uphold the law and sometimes they break the law they are sworn to uphold.  They give orders and they take orders.  And they will obey orders because to not do so means the end of everything they have worked for.  Some of them drink a great deal.  My impression is that women who are cops seem to have something to prove.  Something about cojones.   But I have seen one female cop stand down three strapping 20 something young men on the apron of a gas station.  I knew better than to ask her what it was all about.  She had no backup but you could hear the entire force on the way.  I think she was scared; so would I have been.  But it was one of the finest displays of sheer ‘balls’ I have ever seen.  She was on one knee, yelling freeze, and covering the three of them with the biggest handgun I have ever seen.  Except for the one that once was held about an inch from my left eye. 

Which leads me to the old saw about the officer’s pistol being compensation for something lacking.  I am in a position to comment on that but don’t think I will.

This post is to be continued.  Stay with me.

                                                The Shadow

WELCOME TO MOUNTAIN CITY PARKS

Welcome to Mountain City Parks

No smoking

 No Spitting 

Do not walk on the grass

 Do not lie on the grass

Do not sleep on the benches

Do not sit on the benches

No Bicycles

No flying of kites

No swimming

Do not pick the flowers

Do not smell the flowers

Do not feed the animals

No hunting

No fishing

No skateboards

No roller blades

No copulating

No profanity

No camping

And, of course, no begging

TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED

ENJOY YOUR STAY IN THE PARK

Mountain City Parks and Recreation

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XaI5IRuS2aE    

SCHOOLS OUT

It was a warm spring afternoon in mid May and 12 years of boredom, humiliation, and torture had finally come to an end.

I had graduated from Bloomingsburg  High School.  I had gone through the traditional meaningless ceremonies designed to cast me out into the world, ill equipped to accomplish anything useful.  Yale and Harvard were not for us.  Perhaps Ball State or a Voc Ed school but more likely, the farm, or if we were lucky, the Studebaker plant in South Bend.  Rock Solid.  They had made wagons for the Union Army during the Civil War.  A good dependable place to work.  In four years they would be sucked dry by the badly mangled Packard Corporation and cease to exist as such.  (At the same time I was learning from a very wise man that “Nothing is constant.  Everything changes”).

There had been 12 in my graduating class of a school that had balked at consolidation when that would have been the only sensible thing to do.  The premise being that a basketball team made up of five relative dwarves could overcome all odds, beat Gary Roosevelt and do a repeat of the small town Milan upset of 1954.  Never in your wildest dreams!  They wouldn’t even make a movie out of it.

Behind our house there was a summer kitchen with a leanto woodshed attached to the rear.  It was an easy climb up a farm gate and onto the sloping roof of the shed.  From there I could climb up and hold onto the peaked roof of the summer kitchen.  It faced the South and caught the warmth of the early spring sun.

I don’t think I even changed from my good clothes but I remember that after the last hurrah of the class of 1958 of Bloomingsburg High School,  Bindweed County’s best and brightest, I went home and climbed to my favorite spot in the warm sun.  There, shielded from the house, I could meditate in privacy. 

At 17 I had my whole life ahead of me.  I remember standing there on the weathered wood shingle roof of the woodshed, staring at the back of the farm where it bordered Sheid’s Woods and thinking over and over “I am free.  I will never have to go back to that place again.”