I’ve been on this earth for a good number of years now, so when I do something new, it stands out and I like to share it with my 4-5 readers. Well, such a thing happened recently, so here I go.
With our twins nearing the 18-month mark, there are many things from their earlier months that are no longer needed. My lovely wife has taken to listing and selling many of those items on Craigslist, from Bumbo seats to a nursing pillow. (That led to a great line of mine, actually. The woman buying the pillow was nearing our place as I was directing her via cell phone, and I said, “I’ll be the guy standing in the street holding a nursing pillow.” Big laughs.)
In any case, my lovely wife had been corresponding with a woman over emails for days, and the sale of one of our carseat bases was finally about to happen. Her husband was going to come over and text me when he got there so I could meet him outside. At the last minute, she sent a text saying, “By the way, my husband’s a CHP officer and will driving there in his police car.” What an excellent heads-up!
At the designated time, I received a text message simply saying, “I’m outside.” I grabbed the base and walked out front. Sure enough, a cop car was parked outside. I smiled and waved. As he walked up to me, I noticed something besides the fact that he was a uniformed police officer: the dude was huge. He must have been at least 6’5, and I can’t even begin to guess the weight. As I later told my lovely wife, the only adjective that came to mind was “corn-fed.” “I wouldn’t have been even one bit surprised if he said he played a little defensive tackle at Nebraska,” I told her. He was that kind of big and strong. He shook my hand, but I’m not even sure he could feel it in his giant mitt. I handed him the base. He took out his special police flashlight and illuminated the object. After studying it for a second, he said, “Yep, this is the right one. We install these down at the station, so I knew which model we needed for our seat.” “Oh, do you have the Snugride 32?” I asked. He said he did, and we bonded for half a second over how silly that interaction must have sounded. He handed me some cash, thanked me, and was on his way. I thought it would be rude to count it in front of him, ya know, since he’s the law and everything.
When I came back inside, another aspect of my meeting occurred to me: What would snooping neighbors think went down there? They see a cop car pull up in the late evening and watch as the officer walks to meet me near our front porch. He inspects something with his flashlight, hands me cash, and leaves. How often do you see a cop hand cash to someone (let alone on a dark suburban street)? I doubt I looked like a drug dealer, so maybe I could’ve been some kind of source/snitch getting paid for tipping off the cops when I heard things about to go down. “There’s a shipment coming into Long Beach at 1am – twelve containers of these. They look like normal carseat bases, but if you look right here, you can see where they stash the coke. Now pay me before I change my mind, you corn-fed former defensive tackle at a prominent Midwest football school.” But no, it was just two guys having a little chat while taking care of business. One left with a carseat base for a new member of his family, and the other went back inside with some cash and a new experience to write about. That, my friends, is a win-win.