The phantom police car

In this earlier blog post, I said I would try to write down stories from my childhood so my children could see how I learned as I grew up. Nothing is worse for a child (or young adult or anyone for that matter) than to think they should have all the answers and abilities they will need in life at a young age. And I think we, as adults, often assume that children (and young adults or anyone) should be as experienced as we are at their young age. We must remember what it was like when we were young and making mistakes. And we need to let our children know that it is not the end of the world when they make a mistake. So, I am going to try to remember stories about when I was unsure of myself or found myself in a difficult situation. Then my children can benefit from my struggle and mistakes.

Now, all that being said, this is a story from my teenage years and is not going to be a great lesson to anyone. It's just a funny story and my kids enjoyed it when I told it to them.

I was in a drum and bugle corps and had some great friends in that group and we often got together to go see other drum corps and marching bands in competitions when we got a chance. So, one time when four of us were driving home from one of those shows, we found ourselves behind a bunch of cars going a lot slower than teenagers in a car want to go. The guy driving the car was the director of our drum corps and was older (in his twenties) than the two of us in the back seat. The other guy in the front of the car was an old friend of the corps director. They had gone to high school together and knew each other better than us. So, as our frustration grew at the slow drive, our two older companions looked at each other and said something like, "It's time." Apparently, they'd been in this situation before and had a plan they'd used before. To their credit, they didn't do anything dangerous like try to pass the three or four cars in front of us. They didn't do anything annoying like beep the horn or flash the high beams to get the cars to move. They were the kind of guys you could trust to do the right thing. But not necessarily, exactly, the lawful thing.

They rolled down their windows, stuck their heads out and made an amazingly accurate recreation of a police siren with their voices. It was loud and clear but the the two of us in the backseat had to wonder if it would really work. The "siren" kept going for a while with no response from the cars in front of us but then, improbably, we saw a turn signal go on and the car directly in front of us pulled over. When that happened, the second car in front must have thought, "Well, I don't see a police car or flashing lights but that guy behind me must have seen it so I'll pull over, too." And the ripple effect worked. All the cars in front of us pulled over, too. Our driver knew it would work and he was ready. Off we zoomed and I thought I was going to die - not from dangerous driving but from laughter.

Now, after telling my children this story, for the first time, I wondered how long those poor cars stayed off the road. Obviously there was no police car so how long did they wait before deciding that they'd been had? I hope they enjoyed it as much as we did.