Tag: Deep Dark Thoughts

Grocery Shopping in the Time of Covid-19

Due to the recommendations of our president and state governor, my family and I have been huddling at home, watching television, eating, and generally getting on one another’s nerves for the past few weeks. Whereas I used to get out several days each week to see movies, have lunch, or just meet with friends, I now rarely see anything other than the same four walls inside my house.

The other day, however, I grabbed my car keys and headed to the great outdoors searching for a grocery store so I could replenish the family’s doomsday supplies. I just wanted to get some necessities. You know: chips, sodas, alcohol, and a few bags of mini marshmallows to make rice krispy treats.

In other words, essentials.

When I headed out, I was completely unprepared for what I encountered.

The night before my journey, we had a major storm roll through our town. It rained and the wind kicked up to over 30 miles per hour at times. As I drove along the street leading away from my house, I found myself veering back and forth over the roadway to avoid large tree limbs, garbage cans, and various other debris that had been deposited in my path. There were no other cars on the road, but that actually made the whole thing more surreal.

I felt like I was a lone survivor of the apocalypse, driving through an abandoned city on a broken, partially blocked road. I kept waiting to run into rusted, burned out hulks of other cars that would force me to abandon my car and walk the remaining miles to the grocery store.

And since I had left the house without my machete and sawed-off shotgun, I felt woefully underprepared for this journey.

I fortunately made it to the store without having to give up the car. I also did not see any other people out during the drive, living or undead. The streets were uninhabited.

I did find several cars and people milling about when I arrived at the grocery store. There was a short line of shoppers standing six feet apart from one another waiting for each person to grab a grocery cart, wipe it down with antibacterial wipes provided by the store, then get out of the way so the next person in line could take their turn.

I grabbed my cart, wiped it down, and entered the store.

Many of the shoppers inside were wearing masks over their faces. Some of them were purchased facemasks, while others were homemade. All I could see were dark, suspicious eyes, peering at me over the tops of the masks, gauging whether or not I was a threat. I assume they were all thinking the same thing as they looked me over.

“If he comes closer than six feet, I’m going to cave in his head with a can of creamed corn.”

That’s okay, though. I was thinking the exact same thing about them.

Just like any good apocalypse, the store aisles were mostly empty shelves thanks to previous looters who got there before me. No paper products anywhere. No soap, no eggs, no flour, no sugar. Nothing that could be horded and stored in a garage for coming months of anticipated famine. It was less like shopping and more like foraging for scraps in a bombed-out building.

I snuck around the store, moving from empty row to empty row, trying not to make too much noise. I don’t know why. I just know that’s what everyone does in movies when they’re in a grocery store that has been picked clean. Making noise usually gets everyone killed except the young, good-looking people. Since I know what I look like, I stayed quiet.

I found some of the items on my list, but certainly not everything. Shopping these days is an exercise in futility most of the time.

And there were no zombies to shoot, which made the experience even more miserable. At least with zombies you can work out a few of your frustrations with a baseball bat and nobody is going to call the police.

As I payed for my groceries, I waved at the cashier through the plastic barrier the store had erected between her and the customers. I swear, the stores have more security for their employees right now than most banks. I asked her several times how her day was going before she finally shook her head and yelled, “I can’t hear you over here. Just put your credit card in the scanner and go away.”

After loading my meager supplies into the car, I headed home. It was the same lonely, debris-filled obstacle course I came in on, only in reverse. Nobody drove up next to me to run me off the road and steal my food, which is good. It means society hasn’t broken down that far.

Yet.

Still, it made me glad when I was back home with my family. They drive me crazy, but it is a more normal kind of crazy than anything going on right now outside the house. For the foreseeable future, I am just going to hunker down behind the moat and the barbed wire and try to ride this thing out, at least until the next time I have to go foraging…

Sorry. I meant, shopping.

Shopping with my machete and sawed-off shotgun.

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Asleep At the Wheel

As I have mentioned before, my first job in law enforcement was with the Hillsborough Police Department. What I may have failed to mention about HPD was that it was an extremely small agency. The city was residential homes only – no businesses and no shops – and no more than about 11,000 people resided there.

My badge number was 23, and that was the highest numbered badge in the agency. That might give you some idea of just how small we were.

I worked the graveyard shift for the first several years. Ordinarily, working all night as a police officer is not terribly difficult as there is always something to do to keep you awake and busy. Not in Hillsborough, however. It seemed like the town rolled up its streets at 11 o’clock every night.

With no businesses, and all the residents asleep at night, there was very little for an officer to do in the wee hours of the morning in that town. This was before we had cellphones that would let you watch movies, play games, or check out social media. In fact, if I’m being totally honest, this was before we had cell phones at all.

Some nights, I would read a book. Others, I might meet another officer in our department break room and put a movie into the VHS. Sometimes, however, I would park my car in a dark corner, turn my radio to maximum, and fall asleep.

This may shock some people who have never tried to stay up all night driving a car at slow speeds when there are absolutely no calls for service and nothing to do, but sometimes a graveyard cop just needs to take a nap.

It didn’t happen all the time, but it wasn’t rare either. Rather than fall asleep while driving and waking up parked on someone’s front lawn (which also happened more than I care to remember) it was safer to just park somewhere isolated and close my eyes. I had supervisors that told us they would rather we get some sleep when we need it, instead of crashing the patrol car. It meant less paperwork for them and smaller insurance premiums for the city.

Until one day in briefing, we got a new memo. My sergeant announced that the new chief, Bob McNichol, had announced a moratorium on any cops sleeping while on duty. It had always technically been against the rules, but now the chief was asking the supervisors to enforce the rule and write up any officers caught sleeping in their patrol cars.

My sergeant shook his head at the new order. “This is bullshit,” he said to me and the other officers in the briefing room. “When the chief was a patrol officer, he was asleep in his uniform more than he was awake in it. They might as well have been pajamas.”

But the rules are the rules. My sergeant told us all that from that day forward, if he caught anyone sleeping, it would mean a write up in their file.

I lasted about a week.

One night, there was nothing going on and I was absolutely exhausted from lack of sleep during that past day. The sergeant had warned everyone to stay awake, but it wasn’t as if he was driving around actively searching for officers breaking this particular rule. I decided that I was going to risk it. Just this once.

I pulled my patrol car into the city corps yard, where all the black and white vehicles that needed repair or that had not yet been put into service were located, backed into an empty parking spot to blend in with all the other vehicles, and closed my eyes.

I must have been more tired than I thought. I went out. Hard.

When I woke up, the sun was coming up and the sky had already lightened considerably.

I wiped the sleep crud out of my eyes and looked around. That was when my heart stopped beating for a second.

Parked directly next to me was my sergeant’s car, and he was sitting behind the wheel barely three feet away from me. I figured I was busted and resigned myself to a new letter in my file. I even spent a moment wondering if I should sign the reprimand in blue ink or use red just for dramatic effect.

That’s when I noticed something odd. My sergeant wasn’t looking at me. In fact, he wasn’t looking at anything.

He was fast asleep.

I guess he had pulled up next to me, then while waiting for me to wake up and notice him parked right beside me, he dozed off.

One trick you learn about sleeping in a patrol car is: always leave the car running. That way the radio is always on and you can keep the heater running on particularly cold nights. It is also a lot quieter if you need to leave in a hurry without having to start your engine first.

When I realized that the sergeant was out, I dropped my car into gear, released the brake, and let the car slowly roll out of the parking spot. When I was about ten feet away, I hit the gas and fled for the open road.

At the end of my shift, I just happened to see my sergeant in the halls of the police station as I was getting ready to leave. He waved at me and said, “See you tomorrow.”

I waved back.

That was it. No comments or reprimands about sleeping. I guess my disappearing act had made him realize that he, too, had fallen asleep. I had dodged a bullet.

Fortunately, he had no desire to throw stones in this particular glass house.

That was just fine with me. If he didn’t want to talk about it, then neither did I.

I ran for the parking lot, jumped in my personal vehicle and headed home.

I can’t say that was the last time I ever fell asleep while on duty, but I can say that was the last time I ever let myself get caught.

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The New Abnormal

Over the past couple weeks, the Wilbanks’ household has been dealing with some changes. We are not unique in this respect, I am sure, as most people are trying to adapt and make sense of the struggles in our world today. A very short time ago, people came and went freely, traveling from place to place without a second thought. Today, it feels as if we have all been placed on some type of world-wide house arrest.

I used to have the entire house pretty much to myself every day. My youngest daughter was off to college, and my wife and my oldest kid both had jobs to go to. That is no longer the case.

EM1 and my wife are both working from home these days, and EM2 was asked to pack up and move out of her college dorm room. She is back at home with the rest of us, attending classes remotely on her laptop. (Which is interesting to observe, since as a music major she is required to attend saxophone lessons and be graded on her performance.)

It is a bizarre dynamic. We could all be sitting on the couch one minute, then the next EM2 jumps up and says, “I have to go to class!” That is when she runs into her bedroom, closes the door, and we start to hear saxophone music throughout the house.

Similarly, EM1 will tell us, “I have to go to work.” She then locks herself in her room and starts recording worship music for a church service that will be uploaded onto the internet three days later. Her church is no longer conducting live services on Sundays, so EM1 and the pastor record their portions of the service during the week and splice it all together to post on Sunday mornings.

Between EM1 and EM2, the house is always filled with music. I guess that is a good thing, but I must admit I am more used to having absolute quiet during the day. It is a lot harder to take a nap and binge-watch movies when someone is playing scales over and over on a brass instrument.

Since my wife is home all day, she has started tagging along with me when I am running errands. This is both a blessing and a curse. The other day, we were on our way to the college to pick up EM2 and bring her home, when my wife looked at her phone and told me, “This isn’t good.”

I asked her what the problem was.

She said, “I need to go back home and answer this email. I have to make some phone calls.”

I made a U-turn, took her back to the house and then went to pick up my daughter by myself, 45 minutes later than originally planned.

This isn’t totally new, however. I have mentioned in a previous blog that she is a bit of a workaholic and does the same thing when she is supposed to be on vacation. (You can find that story here if you’re interested.) So, the fact that she has been told by her boss to stay home hasn’t slowed her down one bit. The only difference is now instead of ignoring her family from her job site, we all have to sit in the same room with her and watch her ignore us from three feet away.

The second biggest challenge with all of us being home is that during the slow times we struggle to find things to do that we can all enjoy. For example: we have run out of things to talk about. How can you have a conversation when all four of you are constantly together experiencing the exact same thing at all times?

Me: “Hey, something funny happened to me today while I was fixing myself some lunch.”

EM2: “Yeah, we all saw you do it, and it wasn’t really that funny.”

End of conversation.

So, we try to find other things to distract us from the boredom. We tried baking some cookies recently. That actually was kind of enjoyable, until EM1 sucked all the fun out of it by frosting the cookies so that they spelled out the word, “QUARANTINE!” She has a knack for focusing on the worst parts of anything. I swear, that kid could ruin a New Orleans funeral procession.

Most of the time we simply default to sitting on the couch and turning on the TV. This is not as relaxing as it sounds. The four of us rarely like the same movies or television programs and we argue about what to watch more than we actually watch anything. We recently instigated an “each person gets to pick one thing” policy, but that too has its drawbacks.

After watching a movie that I picked, EM1 got to choose what we saw next. She selected a music video of a K-Pop group (which was not surprising as this is just about the only thing she watches any more). The video was 15 minutes long and, when it ended, I said it was mom’s turn to choose.

EM1 then spent the next half hour complaining that I was not being fair since my movie was 90 minutes long and her video was only 15. I told her we each get to pick one thing to watch regardless of how long it was. EM1 just complained louder. I felt like I was lecturing a three year on how to take turns on a swing.

This is what my life has become.

I don’t foresee any major changes in the near future, so I’m strapping in for a long and bumpy ride. I understand why we all need to stay home. It’s for the greater good. I only hope that in my case, the cure isn’t worse than the disease.

With my family, it could go either way.

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Last Line of Defense

I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know when it happened. Somehow, without my realizing it was occurring, I became the designated “killer of all multi-legged things that get into the house.”

I never wanted the responsibility. I didn’t ask for the position, but apparently it was bestowed upon me by the democratic decree of the other members of my household. I just wish someone had told me when it was happening so I could have removed my name from contention.

Unfortunately, whether I saw it coming or not, I am now the one responsible for removing all spiders, ants, beetles, bugs, bees, wasps, crickets, roaches, moths, mice, mosquitos, gnats, frogs, flies, centipedes, and even the occasional snake from our house.

Just the other night, I was curled up in bed, not quite fully asleep but already slipping into that wonderful pre-sleep dream state, when a voice from out of the darkness said, “Are you awake?”

Well, I wasn’t awake, and I was about to tell the rude, interrupting presence to go away when I realized for the first time that I wasn’t dreaming the voice. It was an actual voice.

It asked again, “Are you awake?”

I opened one eye and saw a blond head peeking around the frame of my bedroom door. It was my daughter, EM1, lurking in the hallway like the world’s worst burglar. I asked her what she wanted. Or, at least I tried to, but I was so groggy I’m not sure exactly what came out of my mouth.

She said, “There’s a spider in the bathroom. Can you come get it?”

Keep in mind, this is a twenty-three-year-old woman asking me to get up in the middle of the night to kill a spider. I wonder what she is going to do when she is living on her own and a spider wanders into her apartment. Call me in the middle of the night to come over and remove it?

Of course not. That’s a silly thing to even contemplate.

I know EM1 is never moving out of my house.

Anyway, I crawled out of bed and staggered down the hallway to EM1’s bathroom to see the eight-legged monster that was preventing any of us from going to sleep that night. EM1 pointed up at one of the walls, close to the ceiling, indicating a tiny black speck about the size of the fingernail on my pinky.

“Really?” I asked. “You needed me to deal with this right now?”

“I saw it once before, but it crawled away. I didn’t want it to get away again.”

Logical, I suppose. But still inconvenient timing.

I stepped up to the wall and reached up one hand to demonstrate that the murderous bathroom dweller was well out of my reach. “I can’t get it. What do you want me to do?”

EM1 held out a cotton ball in her hand. “Do you want to throw this at it? Try to knock it down?”

I told her that no, I wasn’t going to throw a cotton ball at the spider, and started to explain that her suggestion was utterly ridiculous. That was when I noticed that the floor of the bathroom was littered with cotton balls. Apparently EM1 had already been attempting this odd tactic of spider removal.

“Did you throw all these?” I asked her.

“I was trying to get him off the wall.”

“And he just batted them away?”

She gave me a dirty look.

Shaking my head, I began to look around for something that would allow me to reach up high enough to remove the intruder. I found a hand towel next to the sink and picked it up. EM1 held out a hand to stop me, but instead just made an unhappy noise and said, “Go ahead.”

I guess she would rather have to wash her towel than deal with the spider any longer.

I extended the towel to its full length and swatted the hapless critter on the wall. It fell to the ground in typical spider fashion, landing with its multiple legs curled under itself in the international spider language of “You got me and now I’m quite dead.”

Tossing the towel back on the sink, I walked out of the bathroom to go back to bed.

EM1 tried to call me back to pick up the dead bug. “It’s still on the floor. Aren’t you going to get rid of it?”

“I killed it,” I told her. “You can clean it and cook it.”

I heard little squeaks of revulsion and disgust for a couple minutes, then the toilet flushed. The saga had apparently ended. As I crawled back into bed, EM1 called out, “It squished when I picked it up!”

Yeah, they’ll do that. It’s one of the hazards of spider killing. And I should know.

It’s my job.

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Honorable (sort of) Discharge

In the past, I have talked about my dad and my memories of him as I was growing up. He passed away about fifteen years ago, but I was reminded of him recently while I was cleaning up several bookshelves in my den and going through a few binders I haven’t looked at in many years. In one of the binders, I found a manila envelope with a bunch of yellowed documents. They were enlistment and discharge papers for my dad when he went into the army during World War II.

I don’t know a lot about my dad during those times. He didn’t talk about himself much, and it was before he met my mom, so she couldn’t fill me in on any details either. There was one story, however, that he told to me a long time ago about his service in the military, and that story is something I believe is worth sharing.

My dad was born in 1927. In 1941, my dad dropped out of school to get a job and help his family out. They lived on a farm in Arkansas and didn’t have a lot of money, so it was important that the kids went to work to help pay some of the bills. At fourteen years old, my dad dropped out of school and went to work with his dad (my grandfather) at the railroad yard.

He worked with the railroad for four years then, the day he turned 18, he enlisted with the U.S. army. This was in April of 1945. World War II was still an active campaign. Germany was done, but Japan would keep fighting until we dropped a couple bombs on them in August of that year.

My dad told his parents he enlisted because he felt it was his duty as an American. He told me years later he enlisted because getting shot at was still a hell of a lot better than living on a farm in Arkansas.

As soon as the army found out that he had four years of experience running a railyard, they shipped him to Okinawa to oversee several supply trains providing food and weapons to soldiers stationed in Japan. His superiors knew that no one was going to take orders from an 18-year-old private, so they immediately promoted him to Sergeant and told him he was in charge.

Turns out, nobody gave a damn what an 18-year-old sergeant had to say either. It was a bit of a rocky start, but as soon as he proved to everyone that he actually did know what he was doing, it got a lot easier.

Easier, except for the constant retreating and rebuilding as the army lost and gained the same ground over and over on the island.

In August, Japan surrendered. My dad remained in Okinawa for another year or so as the U.S. began the dismantling of the Japanese military. In Fall, 1946, the army decided it was time to start downsizing and sending soldiers back to The States. He received notice in the beginning of December that he was going to be discharged and sent back home.

The day before he was supposed to ship back to the U.S. my dad decided to go to a local bar and get drunk. Whether it was to celebrate leaving the army or out of depression because he was going back to Arkansas, I’m not quite sure. His motivations for the outing are a little muddy.

He told me that he got so drunk, he got into an argument with a few other American soldiers about how well he could shoot a gun, since all he did was drive a train while everyone else was fighting. To defend his damaged pride, he drew his service weapon and proceeded to shoot out the ceiling lights in the bar.

My dad told me he fired his pistol half a dozen times and he hit everything he was aiming at. He told me he wasn’t proud of what he had done, although as he told me the story, he did seem rather proud of his marksmanship.

His fellow soldiers were all very impressed at his prowess as well. His superiors … not so much.

The Summary Court-Martial did not last very long. Since he was already scheduled to go home the next day, the judge decided to allow him to keep his good-conduct discharge but busted him down from sergeant back to private where he had initially started his career.

He wasn’t in the army for very long, which is probably a good thing since my dad wasn’t great at being told what to do and he did have a bit of a drinking problem, which you might have already guessed from the incident I just mentioned. I think he was proud of his service time, however, and he used to joke that during his career in the military he was only a private for two days: his first day, and his last.

When he was shipped back home, his flight landed in California and rather than jump on another plane to go to Arkansas, he stayed put. In that respect, enlisting and going to war did successfully get him away from the farm as he had hoped.

While living in California he met my mom and, well, the rest I suppose is history. I came along in 1966 and made the remainder of his days a living Hell. He once told me that raising kids was more stressful and more difficult than going off to war.

I hope that was a bit of an exaggeration, but I can’t help but wonder if raising a kid like me ever made him wish he had stayed on the farm.

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It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know

My oldest daughter, EM1, is out of school and trying to figure out exactly what it is she wants to do for the rest of her life. She currently works a couple of part-time jobs, but her goal is to have full-time employment by this summer.

We shall see how that works out.

Job hunting is never fun, and it can be quite a beating to your ego as you hear people tell you “no” over and over. I still recall when I was in my twenties and I was trying to get my first job in law enforcement. In the early nineties, jobs were scarce and there were hundreds of people trying to get hired for every two or three jobs out there. I applied to dozens of police departments and most of them simply put my application in their files and I never heard from the again.

Even the departments that brought me in for testing and interviews were just establishing hiring lists for positions that didn’t exist. My name was on so many lists I lost track of the agencies I had applied to, but my phone still never rang.

Finally, tired of waiting for someone to hire me, I decided to put myself through the police academy on my own and hope that with an academy certificate I would be a more desirable candidate.

Okay, honestly, I didn’t put myself through the academy. I didn’t have any money. My grandfather agreed to pay for my training, so I guess you could say that he put me through the academy. He also told me that if I could get hired by a police department before I graduated the academy, I did not have to repay him for the loan.

Of course, he was also pretty confident I wasn’t going to get hired anytime soon.

While in the academy, I met a guy who had been hired by the Hillsborough Police Department (HPD). HPD was paying all of his expenses (unlike myself) and as soon as the academy concluded, he had a job and a paycheck waiting for him. His name was Steve.

Steve and I became friends while we were in the academy. We hung out during most of the breaks, partnered up during scenarios, and then, during classes, he would try to get me kicked out of the academy.

Steve was the guy that will talk to you continuously while an instructor is giving a lecture, or write notes and pass them over to you, never getting caught or drawing unwanted attention to himself. I did not have that same skill. The first time I said something back or opened the note to read it, I would find the instructor standing over my shoulder and asking me if I thought I had more important things to do than pay attention.

Steve would sit next to me with a stern expression on his face as if admonishing me that, “Yes, Gary, you should shut up and listen. Can’t you see the rest of the class is trying to learn something?”

Sadly, this sort of thing happened to me on multiple occasions. Steve wouldn’t let up, and I was incapable of learning how to ignore him.

Somehow, I managed not to get tossed out, despite Steve’s best efforts at sabotage. And as the final weeks of the academy rolled around, it appeared that I was going to make it to graduation. I did not have a job to look forward to, but at least I would have my academy certificate.

One day, Steve came up to me on a break and told me, “I have some good news.”

I wondered if that meant he had figured out a new tactic for getting me in trouble or thrown out of the academy. Turned out, however, that he actually did have good news.

He told me that the Hillsborough Police Department was hiring. He said they had only one position open, but he told them about me and suggested that I would be a good hire for them. He also said the chief at HPD wanted me to send him my resume.

“Um, when?” I asked.

“Now,” he told me.

“Now, now?”

“Right this second, now,” he confirmed.

Well, I didn’t have a resume with me, so with a pen and a sheet of binder paper, I wrote a mostly blank page of reasons why HPD should hire me, then put at the bottom: “Almost graduated from the police academy.”

Next, using the fax machine at the academy office, I sent this illegible sheet of scribbles to Steve’s bosses. It was the most embarrassing job application I have ever submitted. It looked like a ten-year old was writing an essay for his teacher on, “Why I want to be a policeman.”

That should have been the last thing I ever heard from HPD. However, three weeks later, exactly two days before I was scheduled to graduate from the academy, HPD called to tell me that they wanted to hire me.

Steve, the guy I thought was secretly trying to guarantee that I never made it through the police academy, had found me a job. To this day, I still can’t believe the sheer luck it took to be in the right place at the right time with the right person on my side to get me hired.

I found out later that fifty people had applied for that single opening at HPD, but it was Steve’s recommendation that opened the door for me. To this day, I am grateful to him for that.

When I got hired, I called my grandfather that night. I was excited about finding a job and I wanted to thank him again for paying the tuition for my academy training.

I also wanted to let him know that I would not be paying him back.

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Enjoying Deep Dark Thoughts? Follow me on Facebook so you don’t miss a post. Just go to my page and click the “Like” button to receive updates on my blog and other projects.

And you can follow me on Twitter @gallenwilbanks.