Post Thanksgiving good-cop story. Sorta amusing. Definitely sweet.
Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013Since I’ve done my share of ripping into thug cops, it always seems fair to give the better ones a tip o’ the hat. And this tale — from a freedomista’s wary daughter — is pretty cute.
Her dad writes:
So my daughter S. moved away from home at the beginning of November. She graduated from a medical arts program in June, and Florida seemed like a good place to be. My mother-in-law lives there in a [huge community almost entirely made up of seniors].
We packed up the car and my wife took S. to FL to stay with her mom to help her out and until she gets set up on her own.
Mom is getting up there, and her health isn’t that of a youngster anymore. Her daughters all live far away, and most of her friends have passed. But 3 yrs ago at 85 she dumped her 75-year-old boyfriend and bought a house for the first time on her own. She’s fiercely independent, and even though her health is declining she will not accept any outside hired help. The only real “service” she has is a morning phone check-in with the county sheriff’s dept. elder unit.
Unfortunately, mom found herself in the hospital on Thanksgiving morning. She had been there a week. But Thanksgiving morning at 9am, the phone rang at her house with the call from the sheriff’s office. They were making holiday dinner and were inviting all the people on their check-in lists. S. explained that Mom was still in the hospital but could get out for the day, and gave them Mom’s direct number at the hospital so they could invite her to their dinner.
S. thought this was the end of the story.
At about 2 o’clock, S. is trying to decide what to eat before she goes to the hospital to visit, and there’s a knock at the door. She looks through the blinds and sees there’s a sheriff’s officer standing on the stoop. Raised the way she was, she’s automatically suspicious. What could they possibly want? She opens the door a crack to say hi and find out what’s going on, and she sees a big box in the sheriff’s hands. “Hello, I’m Sheriff Soandso. Your grandma told us you were here all alone on your first holiday away from home, and she was worried about you being all alone, worried that you wouldn’t eat, etc. So I brought a full Thanksgiving dinner in this box for you. There’s turkey, stuffing, ham, taters, veggies, gravy, everything. Oops, Sorry, everything but pie. The oldsters ate all the pie”
She was floored. She called the next day to say “Dad, I’ve been around enough to see the sheriffs serve papers, serve subpoenas, and even serve search warrants, but I never thought I’d ever see the day when a sheriff came to the house to serve me dinner! And Dad, it was even good!”
