Police protect and serve even the nutjobs
By:Minx McCloud
This week is National Police Week, and while the theme is a somber one — memorializing fallen police officers and honoring those brave men and women who enforce the law — I can’t help but put my own spin on this solemn occasion.
The police officers in my town deserve to be honored not only because they protect my town, but because they have had to put up with an awful lot of nonsense from yours truly. I didn’t set out to annoy them and waste their time. It just sort of happened.
So the Minx McCloud Patient Policeman Award goes out to the officers that responded in the following situations:
It was 1989 and we had just moved to our little town. One night I woke up and heard something trying to get in through the interior basement door. I cautiously approached the door with a baseball bat. Something was thumping and scratching on the other side.
I visualized a fierce raccoon or skunk, or, worst case scenario, a vicious killer trying to trick me into opening the door. As I dialed the police in a frenzy, I begged my husband not to open the basement door. He was understandably annoyed. He stomped back upstairs and slammed the bedroom door.
“OK,” he yelled, “ but don’t even tell them I’m home. I don’t want them thinking I’m a big wuss.“
So when the police officer came to the door, I pretended Jim was on a business trip. We listened and he heard the tapping beyond the door.
“Stand back,” he ordered me, and unsnapped the leather strap that locked his gun into his holster. Brandishing his nightstick, he opened the basement door and saw an itsy-bitsy field mouse jumping up and down hysterically in a deep bucket.
“Don’t shoot!” I screeched, my heart moved at the wee one’s plight.
The officer rolled his eyes and the look he gave me was priceless.
“I’m not going to shoot him,” he said, and set the mouse loose outside our house. I knew my reputation as a nut had been forged.
Another time, Jim and I locked ourselves out of our house. We called the police and one of our dedicated officers spent the next 45 minutes trying to get us back into our house.
At one point, I even banged on the window and tried to get our extremely disinterested cat to open the door. Lassie, she’s not. It wasn’t time to eat dinner and she couldn’t care less whether we got back in the house or not.
It was a steaming hot night and all of us (humans) were dripping with sweat. The cat, inside the air-conditioned house, was quite comfortable.
The policeman surveyed the bars on our downstairs window, the sturdy broomstick in our patio door track, the double layers of thick glass, and our double dead-bolted metal front door.
“Well, the bad news is, there’s nothing I can do,” he said, shaking his head. “The good news is, nobody’s ever going to break into your house without making a heck of a lot of noise.“
And now, the humorous part: I was so ticked off that I finally gave our “security door” a swift kick and it popped open.
The explanation had something to do with a lock that didn’t quite stick, but — oh, never mind. We check things carefully now (in fact, I’ve been diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive), so don’t even try breaking into our house.
And last but not least, the incident I am still trying to forget.
We had been plagued by cretins who dumped trash in our neighborhood. One night I slept in the guest bedroom and opened the windows so I could catch this guy in the act. He had dumped stuff on our lawn at 11 p.m.
At about 6 a.m. the next day, a car pulled up in front our house. Ever the light sleeper, I sprang into action. The dumper, I thought! Sure enough, he threw something out of the car onto our front yard. I phoned the police. And then he paused.
“What a dope,” I thought. “Why is he lingering?“
Turns out he was planning his route.
But I had already called the cops. Gosh, what a response time! Two police cars screeched to a halt and shone their spotlights on a very bewildered guy delivering newspapers. I cringed in my house. How embarrassing.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. McCloud, it was simple mistake,” the dispatcher assured me later, but I could tell she thought I was a crazy person.
Whether they refer to me as the resident nut, I’ll never know, and I wouldn’t blame them if they do. But I was impressed as how the dispatcher treated me, and to her credit, she did not once tell me to seek medical help.
My town’s police are the greatest.
Minx McCloud is a free-lance journalist who writes about life in New Jersey. She can be reached at [email protected].