A Cop, Bearing Gifts

My eyes look much better today. Thanks for asking. Yesterday I was worried my eyes' gruesomeness would strike fear into my peers' hearts. Today I no longer feel obligated to avoid eye contact.

On Sunday night, I went for a walk around campus with my roommates Natalie and Megan. As we were crossing a particular street, a police car turned the corner and cut us off halfway through the sidewalk. A police officer poked his out the window and said to us, "Good job; you guys are walking inside the lines of the crosswalk. Are any of you soccer fans?" Of course my natural reaction is panic. When does a cop ever stop to make chit chat without an ulterior motive (i.e. "Nice weather we're having. Do you think it'll snow? By the way, you parked nose first instead of backing into one of these weird parking spaces we recently invented in Rexburg. Enjoy your ticket.)? We were walking after dark, and we are girls, and people seem to think that's a bad combination even in Rexburg where the cops spend the majority of their time writing parking tickets and coaxing herds of cattle off the road, so maybe he would mention that. Or maybe he wasn't a real cop at all. I had just watched Hocus Pocus the night before and the kids were trying to tell this cop about the Sanderson sisters' terrorizing the neighborhood, but the cop just scared them off. Then his girlfriend came out of the liquor store and the couple laughed at the naive children who thought he was a real cop.

So the police officer asks if we like soccer. Natalie's response: "Well, we'd like to get out of the middle of the road." Great. Now we're smart-mouthing the cop. Surprisingly, he just said, "Well, I was going to give you a soccer ball, but never mind," and started driving away. He turned around when he heard Megan protesting and yelling at Natalie for losing our prize. When the cop came back, he somewhat sarcastically asked us if we were afraid of cops. I politely reminded him that cops write tickets. "Not today!" he said.

Apparently, the Rexburg police were promoting pedestrian safety by giving away soccer balls to people they saw doing good things, like properly using a sidewalk.

We were pretty excited to have a shiny new toy and happily finished our walk. When we got back to Cloud Nine (Apt. 9's nickname, if you didn't know), our other roommate Cari was standing outside talking to a friend, and Natalie thought she would demonstrate her soccer skills by kicking the ball it high into the air. From where we were standing, we thought it landed right on top of Greenbrier's flat roof. We all cursed Natalie's name as she laughed hysterically. Full of doubt, I ran around to the other side of our apartment, meeting along the way a couple of love birds who were rather impressed that we were able to kick a ball over the building. Phew! We still had our ball, and we didn't kill the couple who happened to be walking by.