I Owe My Guardian Angel a Beer

Your diarist pulled the Subaru off Sunset Drive in Bellingham today followed by a cop car with the lights flashing and the siren sirening. The gray matter started totting up an estimate of how much this ticket was going to cost, and what that would do to insurance.

The officer peeled out of the east-going traffic and had me dead to rights. I had accidentally run a red light making a left turn onto Sunset because the car was trailing a semi. Didn’t see the left turn light was red until I was smack dab in the middle of the intersection, and there’s no point stopping then.

It also happened that I had just checked my text messages in defiance of Washington state’s fascist cellphone laws. I wondered if he saw that as well.

As we pulled close to the road that rings the Sunset shopping center, I motioned to him I’d be heading right into the Starbucks parking lot, so we could deal with this without disrupting traffic. I wondered if I could explain the semi thing and talk him down to a warning.

Instead of following my lead, the cop pulled to the left and went around my car, stopped more traffic, and made his way into the K-Mart parking lot. Several other cops converged on the scene as well and shooed off passers-by from a couple of cars they were interested in for some reason.

This went on for about an hour. The police brought in tow trucks and a k-9 unit. I overheard one observer near Goodwill say something about a “getaway car,” then I headed back to my car and got out of there without a ticket.