This afternoon we strolled down our quaint town's main street (it has a proper name, but everyone calls it Main Street). I wore the baby on my chest, pointed out. The boy and his mom and my sister and her husband all cavalcaded along, when we came upon the quaint police station, which I had in summer placed carefully upon my to-do list as a destination so that we could integrate. We stopped in. I explained to the policeman on duty that I had read in a guide to homeownership that we were supposed to stop in and introduce ourselves to the police.
"You read that in a book?" he asked.
"I guess it's common sense, but yeah."
He made a short speech about how glad he was that we had decided to stop in. He asked where we lived. He wrote it down. He asked if we'd ever had any trouble with the law. He asked if we had ever been convicted of a felony and whether we had ever been denied a home loan or a job on the basis of publicly-available information. He googled us, first me, then my wife, then the boy, then the baby. Fingerprints, strip search, cavity check, blood sample, retina scan, breathalyzer, and we were on our way.
It's good to be here.
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1 comment:
You didn't even get to spend the night? What kind of hospitality is that?
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