By now, those of you who pass my house regularly
on the evacuation route out of town may have noticed we added a garage. The
construction wasn’t without its adventures, but the final result is great.
Especially for the blizzard of ’03.
But while having a garage to house two cars
plus an assortment of tools, holiday ornaments and schmutz has its good
points, there’s been at least one drawback.
My friends keep accosting me with the rant,
“You are NEVER home! Where have you been?
We keep driving by and there’s NEVER
anybody there!”
Okay, pals, think about it. We are not skiing
in Aspen; not out every night slurping Cosmos; and certainly not wintering
in the tropics. We simply parked the chariots in the garage. Duh.
I can’t tell you how many otherwise
intelligent people didn’t connect those dots.
That being said, we did sneak off to Florida
for a week in February and had a grand time visiting friends and family.
Amid lots of vacation fun came a story
that’s too good to keep to myself.
My friend Ronni and I have known each other
since the days when anti-war activists took to the streets and…hmmm. Okay,
that time 30 years ago.
Unlike me, Ronni has a passion for exercise.
Having been an enthusiastic but not particularly fast marathon runner, she
always joked that her autobiography should be called “I finished ahead of
the clean-up truck.”
Now that we’re older, and new generations
of students are out running and protesting, Ronni has traded marathons for
brisk dog walking. Last month when we visited her in Ft. Lauderdale, she set
out early one morning to take her Jack Russell terrier Rufus for a morning
jog.
After quite a long time, she and Rufus
returned, the both of them looking rather shell shocked.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Well, we were coming back from our walk,
when I saw this guy on the beach and he started running toward us. I
couldn’t figure out what he was doing, and next thing I knew he came up to
us, ripped my fanny pack right off me and jumped into a waiting car.”
She was giving me this horrid news, but
seemed oddly bemused. Shock, I thought.
“Oh my god!” I said, “you could have
been hurt, and he stole your purse, omigod!!!!”
“Think about it, Fay,” said Ronni, “we
were coming back from our walk. I’m a responsible citizen, what do you
think was in the fanny pack?”
“He stole a bag of dog poop?”
She started to laugh. “Exactly. There was a
ziplock bag full of it,” Ronni says.
Now I’m laughing like a lunatic.
“Wait, there’s more. I was standing
there, wondering what to do, when this car comes up and a man leans out the
window saying ‘Lady, you just had your purse stolen, right? Well, I saw
the guy get into the car and I chased him.’”
“I think ‘oh, no,’” says Ronni
“But he got away,” says the stranger.
“I think ‘oh, good,’ “ says Ronni
The stranger says “But don’t worry, I
called the police and reported it.”
Ronni tells me she thanked the guy and sent
him on his way.
From there, Ronni and Rufus walked back to
their condo. Rounding the corner, Ronni sees a whole squad of police cars
converged up the street and figures something awful has happened.
“Excuse me,” she says to a female
officer, “I don’t want to bother you, but I wanted to report that my
fanny pack was just stolen.”
With a look of relief and then glee, the
officer shouts to her colleagues, “We got the victim!!!”
“We’re really glad we found you,” the
officer explains, “because we caught the guy and
recovered your purse.
Now can you identify the contents of the purse?”
I’m sure glad the question wasn’t mine to
answer.
“Um, er… three keys….,” says Ronni.
“Yup, the keys were there. Anything
else?”
Ronni tries to gauge whether the officer is
putting her on. No, she seems serious.
“Well, there was a plastic bag with….,”
Ronni looks down at Rufus and up at the officer “dog poop.”
The officer starts to laugh, barely being
able to spit out, “No, we didn’t recover any dog poop.” Both victim
and cop picture the hapless thief inspecting his booty and dumping the
offending package in disgust.
“Talk about having a bad day,” the
officer says, looking at the police car where the poop snatcher sat, sullen
and handcuffed.
“You are going to press charges, aren’t
you?” she asks Ronni. “Since we went to a lot of trouble to catch him
and besides, this was a serious crime, you could have been hurt.”
The upshot was that Ronni had to go over and
I.D. the guy and fill out a report telling the whole truth and nothing but.
A couple of days later, Ronnie found out that
the hapless poop perp had already been arrested once for a drug offense. He
was about to be put under house arrest for the doody heist and with the
state having a three strikes law, it was only a matter of time before he
broke out to score again.
The judge figures he’ll wind up doing
fifteen to life for stealing a bag of shit. Talk about Les Miserable. Jean
Valjean may have been arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, but nobody’s
writing an opera for this doofus. Can’t you just picture him in the yard
at the big house with his fellow inmates asking him what he’s in for?
And we thought we were tough on this sort of
thing on the Rehoboth Boardwalk.
In
Florida, if you doo-doo the crime, you doo-doo the time.
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