An Arresting Development

The other day I got a phone call from my cousin’s son telling me that he has been reading my stories blog and thought he had a good one to tell. You see, Jake lives in New York and had a recent run-in with the cops.

Jake, his wife and the two youngsters were out for a joyous ride to visit family in New Jersey. (That’s where he went wrong in the first place.) A half hour into the trek, they approached the toll booth in the Midtown Tunnel and gave the attendant the necessary coinage. Immediately, an officer who was hanging out with the toll taker took a hard look at the windshield of Jake’s car and with his Superman eye strength noticed that the registration paper indicated that it was now expired. He rushed out of the booth and made them pull over.

Jake’s wife was driving the car so the officer asked for her driver’s license. She pulled out a learner’s permit. The policeman then asked Jake to show his license. He had one, but it was from out of state and suspended. He then asked for a registration card which they could not find and for his insurance card, which turned out to be… you guessed it- expired.
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A Driving Lesson Learned

By all rights, I should have received my drivers license when I turned sixteen in the fall of 1968. The problem was that I flunked the driving test portion of driver’s education class. I got an A in the classroom portion but apparently it did not hold much weight against the fact that I didn’t know how to drive within the lines and parallel park. You’d have thought they would have given me a second chance. But, no- it was tough times in the ‘hood and no one wanted to hang around to re-test me. This was during the summer at Austin High School on Chicago’s far west side a few weeks after the riots in the area just to the east of us in the aftermath of the murder of Martin Luther King.
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