One catches my eye at least a couple of times a month. It will be a big car, moderately old, maybe an Oldsmobile or a Buick, riding low in the back under the weight of its big trunk. The lone driver runs at the speed limit or a little less, casting nervous glances at passing vehicles. If I'm wondering what weighs the car down, you can bet the cops are wondering, too. My daily commute takes me along Interstate 55-70 through Metro East, a major drug-smuggling corridor where patrols lurk and large-scale busts have been relatively regular. [continues 638 words]
Any doubt I harbored that the world had lost its mind was erased with the news account from Texas about a high school honor student expelled for one year because a parking lot monitor spotted a bread knife in the bed of the boy's parked truck. Not a bayonet or one of those nasty hunting things worn in sheaths on the belts of some of my strange friends who drive camouflaged pickup trucks. Nope. A bread knife that had fallen out when the kid hauled some of his grandmother's possessions. [continues 631 words]
My eyes fixed on Rodin's "The Thinker." Not the real bronze sculpture of the hunched-over figure deep in thought, but the small knockoff decoration on a shelf in a friend's dormitory room at SIU at Carbondale. The friend had challenged me to locate her "stash" of marijuana in an environment less neat than a Dumpster the night before pickup. "You'll never find it," she said in almost a dare. Ten seconds later, the baggie of what police like to call a leafy green vegetable substance was in my hand, removed from the hollow under Mr. Thinker's seat. [continues 623 words]
