An Officer's Confessions: Life on the Beat

Autumn has encroached upon us, the ending of one season, the beginning of new chapter of memories. Such has been the case in many of our lives, so incontestable with mine. The cumbrous flow of offenders released during the warm months has slowed to dull roar;a new fiscal year launched, less pressure to purge the prison dwellings.

Vegetation takes notice of the cooling air as they retreat to their big sleep. Soon, the kaleidoscopic leaves will twirl and dance their last number, and take a final bow. The snowy curtain will draw shut and we will have to be content to wait for the next opening Spring act.

My wedding anniversary is prancing closer on the calendar, enticing me with it's delectation and merriment. I look forward to the mountain air, far from this dusty desert waft. Though cool, the lake will intoxicate me with its beauty and grander. Oh how I long it to be the Big Day right now!

So too, this changing of the earthly guard, the younger face of summer replaced with the aging countenance of autumn gray, will be the deciduous past that's ushered in. How can I escape it? Oh how I dread it!

It would've been the heavenly angels of three's birthdays in these coming few months. How I miss them so! How my heart aches and dies softly,silently, and slowly each year as I recall the faded memories of yesteryear, the holidays, the squeals, the enchantment of relatives visiting-they too are all gone. More of me is on the other side of that Gate, and not on this uncelestial footing. I trod on, knowing many still depend on me to stay here and persevere.

This early morn the fog was thick like my thoughts. It dimmed my view as I listened to "What it Takes". It was aptly encapsulating my perception of how I felt then. Yet, I couldn't let go. I just couldn't. My eldest child would have been 15 in less than a month, her brother age 12, and their baby sister age 11. But no amount of tears will bring them back, no sea of sadness will change His mind. The crow has cackled, the horseman on his pale horse has retreated his spear.

I have probably rescinded to this point due to lack of sleep. I must have seen 30 offenders in about the last three hours of my shift late recently. One had self professed poison ivy, but it looked like scabies. Someone at his "odd job" instructed him to put gasoline on the wounds, so he doused his entire body with the toxic mess. My eyes watered and burned as I interviewed him, feeling my innards wanting to violently regurgitate the small lunch I had ions ago.

During that tormenting three hour stint, the loquacious gang officer wouldn't stop cackling. This time, her perpetual energy was focused on a drunk Mexican who didn't speak English. How ironic, as the gang officer didn't seem to speak any English either! To add to the circus, was an officer who did speak Spanish, but the offender was much too drunk to cooperate with her. The offender was hauled off in a squad car eventually.

Perhaps too it could be my aunt's passing recently. Why is it that the dead never look like they did when they were alive? Is it that a person's appearance isn't physical perception as we are so inclined to think? Maybe they looked the way they did because of some innermost person or spirit that has passed after the grips of death.

As this mental soup meringued in my mental faculties today, I turned away as I drove through the urban sprawl, my eyes resting on the school children bubbly and bright skipping to school. They were forming a line on the sidewalk I was driving by. They were dancing, prancing, jumping, and obviously elated. Their voices quivering higher and higher as they held hands in their lines.

Perhaps on a block a way, sat a homeless man at a bus stop. His body movements were animated too, but in a jerking, bizarre way. Easily I could deduce he suffered from Tourette's and/or Schizophrenia. I wondered, with the exception of myself, if anyone else had even noticed his existence lately. I concluded they probably hadn't. This poor man, poor, raggedy, disheveled excuse of human existence. This clump of breathing matter once embodied the love of some parent or parents out there long ago. For once he was a baby, then a child, then a young man. He was loved at some point, he was missed, he was desired, he was needed. What drove him to the point in his miserable existence that he sat there alone at that bus stop, a mere block and a half from giddy school children, waiting for someone to take his three quarters and provide him a dry place to sit and pretend that he mattered?

My offender, a thick black man with no shirt, wearing work pants, and applying deodorant as I talked and checked on his compliance with the law, was mostly nonverbal.

As I left his house, proceeding onward through the myriad of school children, and the homeless man still at the bus stop preaching to himself, I spotted a well dressed lawyer leaving his shiny car to his office door. All three groups of lives, were harmoniously coexisting together but not interacting with one another, in the same three block spans. How strange, how utterly peculiar! How fantastic to be in this shared heavenly globe yet not know or even see the differing life near you!

My car took me back to the office, to the long-winded gang officer; the quiet hermetic boss; the officer with no ability to turn his neck due to enduring health problems; the roly-poly officer suffering with MS who toddles with a cane; the clerks filing their nails wishing for better pay.

I secretly cringe, and then wince a bit, at the three days of work waiting for me after being on bereavement leave. Oh! The warrants, the arrests reports-one of an offender who refused to come down from a tree downtown because he thought he was being chased by a lenchmob (undoubtably he was high on methamphetamines). And, the reports, aggressively dictated to me to be finished by impossible deadlines!

But before the musty walls of the familiar headquarters engulfs me like a starving animal, I take notice of an older gent pushing a baby carriage. It was so odd that he would have a baby under the bridge, where a turnpike swerves and street closure bars forbid travel during the rain. But it was not a young darling resting in the carriage. It was street junk. To him, though, it was precious road treasures. The elderly man wasn't all that dirty and strange to look at, but the sight of him with the carriage was something to behold. I asked myself what led this man to humiliate himself with pushing a carriage all over town begging for food and money? But some questions can't be answered. Some are better left unsolved.