My Brush With The Law

This is the face of a hardened criminal. Yes it is. Today I was telling a friend of mine about my brush with the law. When I was three or four years old, my mother decided she would give me little chores to do, and one of the chores was to take the garbage to the bin at the back of the garden. But I had a propensity to wander whenever I went outside. I would visit the neighbor's dogs, or stroll over to my friend Janie's house, or find some interesting tree to climb. Usually there was a trail of clothing behind me as well ... but that's a story for another day. Anyway, one particular afternoon my mother gave me a bag of potato peelings and asked me to take them to the garbage. On my way there, I saw something interesting in the neighbor's back yard -- I can't remember now what it was. Probably a stick or something. I climbed through the neighbor's fence to investigate my new-found object, and decided to leave my bag of potato peelings in the neighbor's garbage.

Later that night when I was in bed, Constable Bathingswaite of the local police force dropped by to tell my parents that the next door neighbors had called the police on me. I was summoned to the living room in my little white nightgown, my hair in a halo around my head, looking every inch the angel that I was.

*cough*

"Is this the criminal?" Constable Bathingswaite boomed. He terrified me, but he made me sit on his knee while he and my parents had a cup of coffee and a good laugh.

A few years later, I had a severe bout of tonsillitis which required my tonsils to be removed. This was done by surgery under a general anesthetic. Certain anesthetics that are used for surgeries of short duration also have the properties of being what are known as "truth serums". When I woke up from my operation, the nurse standing over me was none other than my wicked neighbor. She looked at me and said, "Do you know who I am?" and I said, "Yes, you're the bad lady who called the police on me!" I couldn't believe what I was saying, and even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I couldn't stop myself. The look of shock on her face is indelibly imprinted on my brain. To her credit, however, she made my hospital stay as comfortable as possible, stopping by my room several times a day with bowls of ice cream and rice pudding.

A few years ago I required an RCMP record check for my job -- through the RCMP Headquarters in Ottawa -- and I was terrified they would find out about my criminal record brush with the law, but apparently they did not. I passed the record check, and I have gone straight ever since.