Worrying about the long arm of the law; my grandson’s

My grandson Edison is a serious kid. He’s ten years old, so the things he’s serious about differ from my own solemn concerns. He’s serious about Harry Potter, Nintendo Wii, his math homework (usually), and most notably, his job in law enforcement.

Edison is a cop.

Considering my own checkered past, I never thought I’d be saying that about a member of my family, but there it is; Eddie is a cop. Well, a safety. And as anyone can tell you, being a safety is that first step on a slippery slope that eventually leads to a career with the FBI or NSA.

Especially for a serious kid like Edison.

Now, before I go any further, I should point out that some of my best friends are cops. Really. Two serve as sheriffs to the counties in which they reside. A few are deputies. One is a young officer with the city of Grand Rapids.

Some of my best friends are cops… Hmm…that sounds uncomfortably similar to a phrase quasi-liberal white people once used to describe their relationships with African Americans. There’s probably a message here somewhere, but I’m not sure what it is.

The point is, during my years working as a reporter covering the “Law & Order” beat I met and befriended many folks in the law enforcement community. Like everyone everywhere, most of ‘em were nice; only a select few were twerps.

I’m afraid my grandson, should he continue his career in law enforcement, might wind up being one of the twerps. Because he’s so serious.

In a 1950s movie, he would not be the cool cop named Dave who lets the kids off with a warning for racing their hot rods out by the levy. If a young Steve McQueen tried to tell him a Blob from outer space was attacking the town, Edison would lock him up for public intoxication.

Edison would be, not Andy, but Barney Fife. That, at least, is my fear.

I base this assumption on his seriousness, of course, but also on the way putting on the uniform seems to change him. In Edison’s case, the uniform is a reflective belt worn over the shoulder, emblazoned with the legend “SAFETY PATROL.”

Every school day, rain, snow or shine, Edison dons the belt and mans his post, a busy intersection less than a block from his elementary school. I’ve seen him in action a few times and I can tell you this; nobody crosses against the light with Eddie on duty! He is large and in charge. Well, in charge, anyway. The safety belt makes him appear large.

When I confront him with my fears, Edison assures me he’s only in it for the hot cocoa the safeties get on mornings when the temperature falls below freezing. But I can’t help notice he’s started referring to kids who try to cut in line as “perps.”

Yesterday I caught him rehearsing the Miranda in front of the bathroom mirror. You know, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law, dirtbag!”

I’m writing this column at a nearby coffee shop. When I drive home, I think I’ll try to avoid Eddie’s corner; I have a headlight out and can’t afford another ticket.

Missed a week? More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

Just say no. Unless you’re a cat, apparently

I’ve never really been big into drugs. This no doubt comes as a surprise to folks who know me well and have always assumed drugs must have played at least some part in the development of my personality. But nope, I got this way all on my own.

I’ve always felt that pot, at least, should be legalized, but that doesn’t mean I’d immediately run out and buy myself a Hefty Bag full of sticky if it were. That’s another discussion, though, one better suited to somebody who writes political columns. I don’t, because I’m too thin-skinned to take the kind of mail you get when you write something like “I’ve always felt that pot, at least, should be legalized…”

So just forget I said that, OK? It doesn’t have much to do with this week’s column anyway.

Yes, this week’s column is about recreational pharmaceuticals, but not the sort enjoyed by homo sapiens (that’s you; yes, even if you’re straight). I’m talking about drugs for cats.

This year Santa brought a little something special for Fuzz, the scruffy-looking ball of fur my friend Rose talked me into taking over a year ago. Before Fuzz came along, I was never a cat person, but over the past year she’s grown on me. Like a fungus.

I’m not sure why Santa saw fit to bring Fuzz anything but coal; her whole purpose in life seems to be attacking my bare feet and trying to murder me by winding around my legs whenever I try to descend the basement steps in the dark.

There’s a reason people in the Middle Ages considered cats to be witches’ “familiars.” Even the best of them seem a little, well, evil. The human-feline alliance has always been an uneasy one, made more so by our knowledge that—if kitty were but 60 pounds heavier—we would be on the menu.

If you don’t believe me, I suggest you check out the 1957 thriller “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” in which the protagonist is reduced through exposure to radiation to the size of a mouse. The first thing his house cat does is try to eat him. Feline memories of canned food and cleaned litter boxes are not lasting, apparently.

Anyway, back to the cat dope. In Fuzz’s stocking was—among the bizzy balls and bite-sized treats—a small baggy filled with a substance that looked remarkably like something generally smoked by drummers and guys who say “dude” a lot.

Following the instructions, I crushed up a small handful of this herb and placed it on the carpet. Fuzz showed immediate interest, as if this were exactly the moment she’d been waiting for her whole life.

She sniffed it, she snorted it, she ate it, she rolled in it. Fuzz was determined to experience catnip in all its myriad permutations.

It made her crazy happy for about ten minutes, and then very, very mellow. I could almost hear the Sgt. Pepper album playing in her head.

I’m not sure what’s in catnip or why Fuzz enjoys it so much, but if they ever come out with something that works that well on homo sapiens, well, I’m going to give it a try before someone makes it illegal.

More Reality Check online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.mlive.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

Is there good left in us, and if so, how do we rediscover it?

I was watching a politician on television the other night, I won’t say which politician. I’m not even sure it matters; so many sound the same these days.

For every official bearing a message of hope, there are hundreds more dashing about like Chicken Little, trying to convince us the sky is falling. “Be afraid!” they exhort. “Be very afraid!”

They want us to be scared, nervous, uncertain. They want us to vote out of fear; fear of losing our unemployment benefits, Medicaid, subsidized daycare, our guns. They want us to believe that—should we be foolish enough to vote the “wrong” way—our very lives may hang in the balance!

The villains in their apocalyptic scenarios are myriad: Arabs, Mexicans, the poor, the rich, the atheists, the Christians, the right, the left; anyone who doesn’t think exactly like us.

Eek!

In my years as a reporter I’ve met my share of senators and congressmen, even had one-on-one conversations with a governor or two. I have discovered the following: They may be evasive, sneaky and sometimes downright dishonest, but they are not idiots.

When they campaign with negative scare tactics and misleading claims, they know exactly what they’re doing. And they’re doing it because it works. Because we continue to fall for it.

I’m thinking these unsettling thoughts because of a conversation I had with my daughter recently while dining at a nearby pub. The TV over the bar was broadcasting a documentary on the civil rights movement.

At one point, Martin Luther King came on, delivering from history’s depths, his “I have a dream” speech.

The bar quieted as heads swiveled toward the television, listening to Dr. King’s message of hope delivered nearly five decades ago from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

“Let freedom ring,” urged Dr. King. “And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

“That always makes me want to cry,” my daughter said.

“Me too,”’ I admitted. “I felt the same about Kennedy’s ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ speech.”

“And Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address,” my daughter added.

We discussed for a while those brief moments in history when a single voice—Gandhi, Christ, Churchill—delivered a message of love, peace, strength, unity. Those moments when one voice whispered to our better nature, to that part of us that strives forever to reconnect with the divine spark that gave us our humanity.

As for me, I’m through being scared. You want my vote next election, Mr. Candidate? Don’t tell me the sky is falling. Tell me what I can do for my country.

More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

Be careful what you wish for; it may leave a bullet hole

When I was ten years old, there was nothing I wanted more than a gunshot wound, preferably in my left leg. Kids want a lot of dumb stuff, but this particular longing was dumb even by kid standards.

Didn’t matter. I wanted that gunshot wound more than I wanted G.I. Joes, a James Bond spy kit and X-Ray Specs combined. I would have given almost anything to get someone to shoot me in the leg.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) I didn’t know anybody who owned a gun. Nobody who was willing to shoot me, at any rate. Considering the kind of kid I was, you’d think people would have been lining up for the job.

I wanted the bullet wound because of a kid I’d met the previous summer at the drive-in, back in the days when there were drive-ins and they had playgrounds up by the screen to keep the abundant progeny of Catholic parents busy until the sun went down.

The kid I met had a big scar on his left thigh. Its center was the size of a quarter, with shiny scar tissue radiating out six inches in all directions. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen! The kid’s dad had shot him accidentally a couple years earlier while cleaning his pistol.

Words can’t describe the jealously I felt over that kid’s wound. Not only was it the hit of the playground, but the scar unsurprisingly repulsed every girl who gazed upon it. In the words of Keats, that scar was a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

The idea that getting shot with dad’s .45 must have hurt like crazy never crossed my mind. The possibility that taking a large-caliber bullet might be fatal also never wafted over my transom.

I was a kid. And a dumb kid at that.

As I grew older, my desire to get shot faded. By the time I was a teenager and living in Detroit, where getting shot was a distinct possibility, the longing for a bullet hole had departed entirely.

But recent events have me wondering if I’m really any smarter now than I was then. Do the things I want these days make any more sense than did a bullet hole, or am I still doing things that will wind up scarring me in the end?

In the past couple years, I’ve dated half-a-dozen girls but the only one I really got serious about was—you got it—the one most likely to leave me scarred. Though the pain of the breakup was probably not as bad as, say, getting shot with a .45, it wasn’t as pleasurable as an evening out with Heather Graham might be, either.

And yet, I wanted it. I pursued it.

So. Do we get smarter as we get older? Maybe you do. Me?  The jury’s still out.

If only someone had gone ahead and shot me in the leg back when I was ten, my entire life might have been different. Plus, I would have that cool scar!

More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.