Really? My last post was in Advent? Huh. Well, it's Lent, so I guess it's time I post again...
Friday I was not well. I was the sort of "not well" that wakes one up at 3 am and lets one know that despite all previous plans, one is not going to go to work, one is not going to the awesome Hartzell United Methodist All You Can Eat Fish Fry and one is not going to the CD release party for the spectacular new release by the amazing Pomegranates, Everybody Come Outside!
Twelve hours after this realization, I decided to risk a walk around the neighborhood in the interest of a change of scenery. I was feeling a bit better, so I stepped out of the apartment with my long black leather jacket over a red ribbed sweater and my favorite gray pants and started out on the forty-minute circuit I like to walk.
I was almost finished--I'd turned my third corner--when a cop car pulled up and two cops came out of it and they said, "Put your hands behind your back! We have a warrant!"
Um?
I put my hands behind my back. They handcuffed me. All I could think was, "I hope wherever you plan to take me has a bathroom."
"What are you doing out here?" they asked.
"I'm on a walk," I said. "I have a forty-minute circuit I like to walk."
"Have you been arguing with anybody?"
"No."
"Do you have any identification on you?"
"No. But if you take me back to my house, we can get it."
"We had a call on a domestic dispute involving a woman with a red sweater and a black leather jacket."
As the cop was saying this, I could see "maybe this isn't the right chick" cross his face and the face of his partner. One kept looking up the street, muttering things like, "She should be coming round the corner any second."
They asked for my name, social security number and birthdate. I gave all of this information, and one got on his walkie-talkie and relayed it. They both sighed in exasperation as the woman on the other end got the numbers wrong, they repeated them, and then we waited. While we waited, one cop decided I didn't pose enough of a security risk to warrant the metal, so he released me from the handcuffs. I put my hands in my pockets and then remembered policemen want to see your hands at all times, so I took them back out again.
We waited, the one cop continuing to look up the street. I stared off into the middle distance.
The cop who kept looking up the street looked at the red lion emblazoned on my necklace and said, alluding to the birth date I'd given him, "I wondered if that necklace meant you were a Leo."
"No, it's actually from Chronicles of Narnia," I said.
Trying to find me in their system was taking too long for their tastes, so finally they said, "Let's just go. Sorry, ma'am." And they got back in their cop car and drove off.
The whole thing probably took no more than ten minutes. I've been having some interesting "Yeah, I've been handcuffed by the police" conversations with random folks because of it.