Elsewhere today, a guy called John was stopped by the police. It wasn't anything out of the usual: he slipped through the subway gates behind me and the police saw him. Because he hadn't used his own ticket, they took his details and fined him $15. John was just out of hospital: he's had a hip replacement and is currently out of work. The policeman was sympathetic. John doesn't have a lot of money at the moment and is clearly in pain. The policeman empathized and explained that John has a year to pay the fine. He said that he hopes that John is 'back on his feet' by then - I don't think that he was talking literally. John called the policeman 'sir' whenever he answered a question. He was very polite. In return, the policeman called him 'John'. He was also very polite, although his police badge looked slightly incongruous against his civvies - he was wearing a Boston Red Socks sports shirt and shorts.
Workmen are digging up the road at the junction on the corner of where we live. They look as though they are working hard. Whenever I walk past they are covered in sweat (it's hot and humid at the moment) and I have seen no evidence of tea breaks. Two police officers are managing the traffic at the junction. They've got their sunglasses on and they chat back and forth to one another. They are not sweating. When they see me trying to cross, they stop the cars and call me 'ma'am' and tell me to 'have a nice day'. I feel very grown-up (too grown-up, if truth be told, with my bag of groceries and my respectable moniker of 'ma'am') and I feel responsible to cross at exactly the moment that the police tell me to. The police around here instill that kind of respect in people. You'd never disagree with a Cambridge cop.
When Maya was in hospital in New Mexico (a time so very awful that I am reluctant to write about it here), we stayed in the Ronald MacDonald House for the parents of sick kids. I had breakfast several mornings with an amazing woman called Bonnie. She was in her forties, recently remarried, and she was staying in Albuquerque to take care of her new husband's young nephew while her sister-in-law traveled backwards and forwards to visit her brand new and very premature baby who was in a nearby hospital. I really liked Bonnie. She was down-to-earth and had a great sense of humor. Her new husband is a State Trooper in Wyoming. On the morning that we left, she told me how excited she was that her husband was driving down to Albuquerque that day. He was bringing two guns with him, she told me. One to carry with him and one to keep in his car. He thought that it was important to plan to be on the safe side. I didn't ask Bonnie if she kept a gun in her car. There was a big sign on the entrance to the Ronald MacDonald house stating that guns, smoking and alcohol were not allowed on the premises. It seemed to me to be highly unlikely that Bonnie would have broken the rules: most people here don't.
It's easy to be flippant and the temptation is always there. I suspect that the two policemen at the end of my road are more expensive to fund than the temporary traffic lights that accompany roadworks in England and I'm not completely sure that they are doing a better job. Critics argue that the Cambridge police generate a disproportionate amount of funding through the statutory requirement that police must be paid to be present at every piece of roadwork in the city. There aren't a lot of crimes in Cambridge, compared to many places in both England and America. So, either the police strategy is working well, or there really isn't that much for the police to be doing around here (except stopping derelicts who lack subway tickets and masterminding road-building operations). There have been no recorded murders in 2012, and the most common crime is bicycle larceny - 66 bicycles have been stolen so far this year. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, police can normally be seen cruising around in their huge cars while drinking huge coffees. It doesn't seem to be the worst job in the world!
One morning, Bonnie and I shared a few tears. We were talking about how happy she was in her second marriage and the romantic moments of serendipity which had led her to meet up with her new husband. She was a charge nurse in a trauma unit. He had been badly shot. She helped him in his recovery. Every day when he goes to work, she worries that he might be shot again. Every time that he stops a car, she worries that the drivers might be armed. As with traffic control at building sites, that's just part of their job.
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