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9.5 Guilty

I'd only been in the nursery for twenty minutes, but the car had become a little oven on wheels. Once I got moving I hoped the breeze would make a difference, but it didn't - not much anyway. By the time I'd turned from Garfield onto Golf things were getting pretty uncomfortable, sweat dribbling down inside my shirt. I was yearning for cool home and didn't really want to think about that cop on the other side of the street, but he apparently was thinking about me. A quick glance at the dashboard clarified the reason for his flashing lights...35 in a 25, damn. I wanted to say, "Officer, do you know how slow 25 is on a steamy Sunday when you just got to get home. 25 is a slow ride through the petting zoo." He walked up, checked out the wilting plant in the backseat. I handed him my license. "Sir, you were going kind of fast back there. Take it easy from now on." Oh, yes, a warning. I can live with a warning. "Yes, sir, I will be more careful." Thank God I didn't have purple hair or anything.

My last cop-stop was about seven years ago, when I was running very late on a stupid gray Saturday morning and knew I had the entire JCA scholastic bowl team waiting to begin a long trip off into the wilderness toward Somewhere, Illinois. I was just about there when I got the lights and a blip of the siren right on Ingalls, right in front of the JCA parking lot, right in front of the entire JCA team. Again, no ticket, but it was a miserable trip to Somewhere, Illinois.

So I've been living on the edge for quite a while now. It's only a matter of time before the world discovers that I am The Norman Schwartzkopf of Vehicular Crime.

One other thing was on my mind this afternoon as I drove toward my rendezvous with the merciful cop. Before the nursery I had been to Sears, purchasing a comfortable reading chair. With taxes and delivery charges, it turned out to be a bit more expensive than I had planned on. I was feeling kind of bad about this. I don't really deserve such a nice chair, you know. So the cop's appearance was psychologically resonant, if you know what I mean. I once had a therapist who tried to convince me that guilt was never positive or productive. For a while I resisted the idea, but eventually I felt bad for being so stubborn (he was a kind man), and I gave in. While digging up the Smartypants quote down below, I came upon this other thought by Mr. Spoto:

With Catholic artists as different as England's Graham Greene and Japan's Shusako Endo, Hitchcock shared an intuition that one can, in the last analysis, be freed from corruption only by guilt - by standing condemned and accepting forgiveness and redemption freely or enduring punishment and hoping for a second chance.

Good Catholic Guilt. In our formative years we certainly received regular, massive doses. So, where would we be without it? Living in the best and brightest of all possible worlds? Maybe, but I doubt it. We'd probably be right where we are anyway, since most of the world (present company excepted) seems perfectly able to do without... and be just as sufficiently screwed up.

Personally, I've always been attracted to the notion of throwing myself upon the mercy of the court. It seems a useful posture in a world where I'm bound to screw up and where somebody else always holds the keys. But, as I recently discovered in other circumstances, sometimes the court dispenses no forgiveness, no second chance at all, because it has other plans.

What's that old line? Live and learn? Well, I've been trying.

The Jog. Down below, a trashy track littered from this afternoon's 8th grade game. Up above in the east, four clear pink fingers of cloud and a barely discernible thumb. I raise my right hand to meet it. A perfect fit.

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