Senator in Response to Your Question I can Unequivocally Say , I Am Not Now, Nor Have I Ever Been, Nor Will I Ever be, Courageous.

 

Courage, according to the Oxford dictionary, has two meanings. The first is, “the ability to do something that frightens one.” The second is, “strength in the face of pain or grief.” Over the months since Francie and I moved to Portugal a number of people have used the term courage to describe our experience leaving America as emigrants to Portugal. I really don’t think that is the right word.

Clearly the second definition is not applicable. The only grief or pain associated with our move is those pangs of hurt we feel watching our birth country stumble toward authoritarianism. Yes, I am talking about the Trump/MAGA juggernaut toward acceptance of the former guy’s “Do what I say and the Constitution be damned" mantra. Yes, I am also talking about the House of Representatives electing an election denier to the speakership. Leaving in one sense probably shows more of a defeatist attitude than courage if you boil it down to the essence. But sadness was not the prime motivator of our move.

Coming to Portugal was more like accepting the truth of a logical syllogism. I know it doesn’t have the same ring for someone to say, ‘you are such realists for having moved to Portugal.’ After my second bout of cancer, I gave up on my belief that I would work until I croaked at my desk. Following my surgery which took a fifth of my left kidney, I was pretty sure that the expiration date stamped on my bottom had moved up and no longer said, "Best before April 2033.” The date was probably a great deal closer to a best used by date of April 2026. 

Having decided that I probably don’t have a lot more time on this planet I started thinking what have I, what have we worked for all these years? Well first there was a desire to get out of Michigan's f#%king cold. Four seasons my ass, Michigan is really a place of 8 ½ months of cold and clouds most of that sprinkled with snow of some depth. 1 month wraps around those months with mud and false promises of beautiful springs and lovely falls (invariably a harsh rain comes and destroys the fall colors. Alternatively, it gets hot in late May and suddenly summer is just there.) The short remaining months are hot, humid and filled with tornado sirens.

Next there was the desire for the sea and fresh seafood. Both of us were water babies. Francie was raised in Volusia County and Daytona Beach and its waves were her ingrained memories. Me, my memories come from somewhere farther up the Atlantic coast , more specifically Ocean City, NJ, America’s family resort. The smells of salt water and frying flounder are wired into my head as the epitome of life’s best things. Watching waves for hours on end, well there is nothing better. Forty years in the Midwest of America seem like just passing the time.

Given those two critical motivating factors we looked about in America. The left coast was way, way ….way too expensive for two people who had worked in the heartland for forty years. The south was too, too…way too MAGA. Thus, we had to look at other countries. 

Loved Victoria, BC. However, it is expensive and old geezers can't legally retire there. I thought about requesting political asylum but the Canadian immigration folks have not been receptive to that argument from leftist US Democrats with 401(k)s in the past. So where could we find a stable government, decent health care and a not oppressive cost of living? If you have been reading the papers over the past five years Portugal is always near the top of the lists. And we had been to Portugal and liked it. And it is coastal. And there is really good seafood.

Okay, emigration paperwork is onerous. Opening a bank account is byzantine. Juggling the cash needed to get an apartment, gather furniture for the apartment, and airline tickets to our destination was a hassle (and obviously more expensive by half than we thought it would be). But we didn’t have any real fear.  There was some doubt, the “Are we really doing this?" moments. Doubt is not fear. Facing hassles is not the same as facing dire diagnoses or standing up to home intruders. Those moments generate real fear and require tremendous courage in response.

The closest I came to fear in this whole process was when a couple of butterflies cropped up in my stomach. This was as I rode the train up to my immigration hearing here in Portugal. Seriously, that's the worst of it. Maybe it is because there is an escape hatch. If at any point we decide we don’t like our life here anymore an airline ticket home is not that expensive. It would take us four months of rent to buy out our lease. We would take a few thousand dollars loss on the furnishings we bought, but I have pissed away more money on lesser things. We have a parachute and a ripcord if it all becomes too overwhelming.

In my mind moving here from Michigan wasn’t really that much different from moving to Florida. However, there are no asshats with Trump 2024 flags planted in their rusted pickup truck beds, waving wildly just behind the gun rack in the back window. Courage no, wanderlust filled yes. Crazy, yes. Impractical, yes. Longing for and looking for serendipity, yes. Maybe even adventurous in the sense you call somebody eating raw kibbe for the first time adventurous. We aren’t fearless explorers. We are those kids just out of college who want to wander Europe with a backpack, a dog-eared travel guide and raging hormones. Well, we are those kids just with more money, grayer hair, a need for more privacy, a need for clean sheets, a need for regular showers and with just a tad less hormonal lust. Oh, the guidebook is now on our iPad.

A Shaggy Dog Tale About Karmic Justice.

 

How you read your gas gauge depends on two factors, your current economic condition and your level of life experience. If your pockets are a little light in the change and folding money department you tend to read an analog fuel gauge, you know one with a needle that runs from E to F in nanometers. With a little jingle in your pockets, you tend to fill up at a quarter of tank as opposed to when you are running on vapors. How experience factors in is that if you have never run out of gas you may be willing to run a little closer to the E mark than you should. In early 1986 these two factors became a bit of a perfect storm for my wife and me, and for one officer the Wilmington Delaware police department as well.

On May 4, 1985 my wife and I were married in the cloudy moist South on the eastern coast of Florida. Rain and grey marked our day. However, the inclemency was not an omen or a portent of ill to come for we are still married 37 years later. By the fall of that year, we had pulled up stakes moving from Michigan for the Atlantic coast. Oh, we got married in Florida because it was neutral spot, our families lived respectively in Florida and New Jersey and our friends lived in Michigan. Two of the three groups would be travelling so why not make it a Florida vacation for those two groups. It was because of my desire to live closer to my recently widowed mother that we commenced living in Wilmington, Delaware. Wilmington was about 10 miles as the crow flies from where I had grown up, 10 miles and a whole social stratum away from where my roots were.

Weird town Wilmington, the place is very obsessed with status and anything that carries the hallmark of old money. Remember Delaware is the place where someone one paid three quarters of a million dollars for a low license plate number because of the perceived high status owning such a plate carries. A lower number is found on an older plate, a plate colored black as opposed to blue and gold. A lower number implies a longer time in the state and more political and social standing. Three quarters of a million bucks so your car had a number of less than 10 on it, oh-my-gawd.

Wilmington was all abuzz with economic activity at the time. It was a boom town filled with yuppie scum. The feds had popped the cap off interest rates and Delaware long the bastion of corporate America had abolished usury limits completely. As the big money flowed in following these miraculous events Insurance companies and credit card companies were opening headquarters all over town. Walk into a bar like O’Friel’s on Delaware Avenue and throw a Heineken in any direction and you were sure to hit a young middle manager from one of these emerging powerhouses of capitalism squarely on one of their flat right leaning heads. In Brooks Brother’s suits with discrete tattoos over their buff upper torsos that said “Eat the Poor” they were going to rule the universe. Ugh.

Having moved back with the hope of being a good son, something that really didn’t work out well for me, a close relative had found me a job. With a little jostling here and there, I found myself working for an insurance company, Alico, one of the AIG Group of companies. I was a corporate attorney but I really didn’t fit in. I wasn’t making much money either for despite television depictions corporate lawyers working in house for financial companies don’t all make wheelbarrows of money. Maybe it was because I was just nuts, or maybe I didn’t have the desire for status or the overarching lust for power that seemed to be the hallmark of the place, I was always the odd person out. I so didn’t fit in to the corporate world that when I left the company I got a plaque that said, “Some men travel to the beat of a different drummer, you travel to the beat of a drummer from the Far Side.” I liked it.

While I was indentured in corporate servitude my wife was working as a freelance writer. She was drafting things like college catalogs for small Midwestern colleges. Freelance work required long hours just like being a corporate attorney. We both worked weekends and often we worked late into the night. We lived in first floor apartment that was carved out of an old row house. Row house that is what we called these three-story brick units as kids. By the time Francie and I moved in these buildings were being called townhomes. Status you must remember causes people to do weird things, even to rename building styles; Wilmington was all about status. Too bad we drove a Ford Escort.

When you are young and living in this environment you do foolish things. You go out and eat at four-star restaurants but you buy economy gas and have no furniture. You dash about always and you sleep very little but you very definitely try to go to the right places. Sometimes things just get away from you and so it did that night on hill in front of the Wilmington police station.

The start of the actual story was that my brother whom I had not seen in some time was in town. He and a mate were staying at the Hotel DuPont, a very gracious and grand hotel. The Hotel is at 11th and Market and takes up the entire city block. Many major corporations book the theatre in the hotel for their annual meetings. My brother, his friend, Francie and I had met and had dinner at the hotel in the Brandywine room. I always loved eating in the Brandywine room because we would often sit below an original N.C. Wyeth rendering of an island painted with the most exquisite of blue colors.

The dinner discussion was lively and surprising. While we were telling stories my brother’s friend and I discovered that we knew the same crazed liquor salesman from Detroit. It came about when he recounted a tale about a guy who was pissed off at being locked in a parking lot after hours. The gent missed curfew and the owner chained and locked the lot. The unhappy patron shot off the lock. I looked at Francie and noted that it sounded like our old friend Vern. The friend then said Vern’s last name and we knew it was the same guy. Hearty laughs all around at the small world aspects of this. 

Not wanting to end such a fun evening the decision was made after dinner to head out to Buckley’s Tavern just up the road inside Pennsylvania for a couple of mid-evening drinks. To pull this off Francie and I needed to get some things. First there was money to be obtained for drinking. This meant an ATM trip. Also, our old analog fuel gauge was not looking good. Its needle had recently made its bed on E and some gas was required. This meant we had to stop again at the nearest pump about 8 blocks away.

We went to the ATM first, which was just a short walk away from the hotel. Wilmington is a maze of one-way streets. Thus, there was no direct route between the hotel, the ATM and the gas station. After the ATM and a couple of turns we headed for the gas station. The street we ended up on took us past the front door of one of the city’s police precinct stations.

While not San Francisco the hill in front of the police station was substantial. You felt like you were on 10 per cent grade. The street was three lanes wide, all heading uphill. It was at the top of the grade that we needed to turn left onto another one-way street. Simple deal we were almost home free. I did say I was an entry-level attorney right? I did mention that my wife was a free-lance writer and that no money had come in lately, right? As we reached the top of the hill the mighty Ford Escort the plebian mobile made a muffled choking noise and died. Stone dead from petrol starvation it was.

So, to sum up what has happened so far, we are at the top of a steep hill, in the left lane waiting to turn. The car has died. With the engine’s demise due to a fuel deficient diet the power steering also died. Sitting in a dead car at the top of a steep hill your senses awaken. You become aware of things you never noticed before. In that moment of clarity, we both noticed that each side of the street was lined with either black and white police cruisers or with obviously unmarked police cars. And as we have no gas and as we have maybe some outstanding parking tickets, this is not a good situation all around.

I was the passenger and it seemed to me that the most reasonable idea was to park the car. We could then hike a few blocks down the street to the Arco station, get some gas and get out of there as fast as we could. However, we could not leave the car in the middle of the street. As luck would have it there was an open parking spot about two car lengths down the hill from us. This barren wasteland of blacktop was clearly visible in the midst of the unmarked cruisers lining the left side of the street. I got out of the Escort and prepared to direct Francie as she rolled the car back and into the spot. Easy right? Nayh.

As I noted at least once the Escort had power steering. When the power was out attempting to steer that car was like forcing limp spaghetti through the eye of a needle. It only took a yard or two of rolling to see that Francie would not clear the first unmarked cruiser. This is because she cut the wheel too tight. The tough box was getting tougher.

As luck would have it, a couple of detectives were coming out of the police station at that moment. As luck would not have it one of them screamed “Don’t hit my car”.

Trying to be polite I explained to the two guys who had not formally introduced themselves to us yet our predicament. I asked if they could have someone from inside the station to roll the first car back into the lower space. We could then roll into the upper space and go get gas and be on our way. One of the officers with his chest pumped up pulled keys out of his pocket and started to get into the first car. I said in what appeared to be a safe bet, “So you guys are police officers?” Detective braggadocio almost spat out the retort, “Nayh, we are thieves, the police just give us keys to make our jobs easier”.

In retrospect I can offer some opinions as to this officer's attitude. I spent twenty years getting to know many local police officers. In my daily routine, I’d listen to them tell their stories and gauge their demeanor and veracity. They, like any other group of people that hold power over another group of people, develop certain styles of exercising that power. Some people are calm and dispassionate and like that idealized parent exercise their power only when needed to correct a misguided course or when a firm hand is needed to curb just plain wrong actions. 

Others don’t seem to deal with the fact that they have power well. Maybe it is because they have never developed a stable sense of self-worth before acquiring power. Others are just dicks from the get-go. I think this officer was a dick from the beginning of his sucking air on earth. As I was standing there on the street humiliated by the lack of gas, and by the attitude of the cop, I wondered to myself how could this get worse? It only took a second to find out. 

After Fearless Fosdick jumped into the cruiser he without turning on the gas threw the car into neutral and began to roll the car back down the hill. He was watching the Escort and maybe me and I was watching him. Francie looked through the rear-view mirror. At about the same time I came to a realization that made me bite my lip. Francie came to the same moment of clarity and put her head down on the steering wheel so her facial expression would not be visible. Fosdick’s partner and I saw at about the same time what Fosdick did not. As the cop car gained backward momentum, the other officer screamed “Joe the doo……..r”. At the moment when I was drawing blood from my lip from biting it so not to laugh at all-not even a little bit, and the sound of crunching screaming metal came from the door of the cruiser crashing into the telephone pole.

The noises which included the whine of stretched metal, the pat pat pat of fragmented pelletized pieces of glass hitting the pavement and the crunch of wood from the telephone pole hung in space for a second. Then came the sound of a long bang as the driver’s side door hit the sidewalk. The unmarked car’s door was now attached to the vehicle by only one mangled barely connected hinge. Francie was banging her head on the wheel not to laugh. I was about to swallow my lower lip and the other officer was screaming, “You idiot” at officer dick.

It was awkward but in that particular maneuver, what Francie and I wanted had been accomplished. The police car moved one space down the hill. Sizing up the situation and thinking about what was the right course of action for Francie and I, my thought was I should ask if the two policemen minded if we moved into the space previously held by the now mangled cruiser. The clearly agitated driver more or less screamed “Why the hell would I care about what you two do?” So ever so gently, as the street was filling with other police officers (who were laughing their asses off as the non-driver was relating what had just happened) and with deftness motivated by fear and adrenaline, Francie pulled our little car against the curb and we skedaddled. As we jogged/ran to the gas station we laughed so hard we almost pee’d ourselves. Karmic justice is fun to watch.

Returning to the scene of the incident it was interesting to see all the police investigators combing the scene. There were tape measures out. People were taking pictures, lots and lots of pictures. Tablets were being jotted upon. Francie was required to produce her ID. The thing that was curious was that the cops took pictures of every angle of our car. When Francie asked why when he was shooting our car when we really had nothing to do with the actual accident, the photographer just walked away. Upon putting the gallon of gas I had just bought into our tank I asked the non-driving officer if we were free to go. He muttered an epithet so vile that I can’t repeat it here but pointed down the road. We turned the engine over and left. Given the way things were going that night we decided drinks and driving through Wilmington just didn’t add up. We cancelled the bar run. 

Before all his evil came to light, Bill Cosby did stand-up comedy. As a kid I listened to records with titles like “Why is There Air?" This was a riff based around the difficulty Mr. Cosby, who attended Temple University as a student aiming to be a physical education teacher, had dating a philosophy major. He in his ever fluid voice would get agitated and say she was always asking questions, “Why is there air?” He was always answering (in a hyper excited voice if the record was correct), “So we can blow up volleyballs and footballs and basketballs.” One of his riffs on this record, if I am remembering it right was something to the effect that parking tickets were sort of an inverse savings bond. In his case he came to this awareness when he hit a patch of ice and banged up his old beater of a car. A good Samaritan came by and lit flares up around the vehicle in his words “lighting it up like a birthday cake”, and he tried to blow them out so as not to have to go to jail over the glove box full of tickets.

Essentially, retribution was the root cause of the "doofus officer’s" scene investigation in our case. Wilmington had a parking ticket policy. If you had four tickets you were subject to the boot. If you had three or less tickets the parking authority would max them out quickly and wait for you to pay. We lived in an upcoming neighborhood where you had to buy a parking sticker; our permit was considered a hunting license for a parking space. If you found a slot in your zone that wasn’t otherwise prohibited you could park there all night. Our zone however ended right at our front door. We lived on the corner of a block so if the block was full you might have to park in the next zone. Depending on the meter maid's zeal you might or might not get a ticket for this. Well prior to the out of gas car/police car without a door, I had been holding three tickets for more than four months.

Not the following morning, but the next night after the door incident, the parking authority exacted Officer Fosdick’s revenge. We awoke to find the bright yellow boot of shame affixed to the driver's side wheel. It cost $125 in 1985 money to get that puppy removed and the folks at the parking office took their time about it. When we walked to the parking bureau no one would acknowledge the existence of the four-ticket policy or that it had been breached in our case. Additionally, no one was receptive to the, this was revenge, dialog I tried to engage in. Still, from the various eyes in the room focused on us, it was clear that ours was not a normal case.

Thinking back all these years to the incident makes me laugh. Yeah, it cost me $125 in difficult to find cash at the time. However, at least I am not the person whom for the rest of my police career would be known as "Crash" or "Door-less" or "Eagle eye." Sometimes arrogance gets its due, especially when it serves no purpose but to humiliate someone in need. WPD 0, Karmic Justice 1.