Who called the cops?
I’m not one to believe that the world, Mother Nature or other supreme being is trying to send me messages. I don’t hear voices, nor do I perceive coincidence to be anything more than a coincidence. Maybe I’m too dense to actually understand the message if there is one, but I doubt it. I’m not that important. I don’t think that my future is pre-determined, other than at some point I will cease to exist physically (and likely in a generation or two, will be forgotten), nor am I predestined to some great fate. I’m not even overly superstitious (although I have tended to test very well on Friday the 13th). I pretty much think luck is of my own making (I didn’t call it luck when I had an easy tap-in pretty much every season when a goal keeper would unexpectedly drop the ball, it just meant that I ran towards the goal keeper each and every time and, do that a hundred or so times a season and the keeper will fumble a ball at least once), good or bad, and that sometimes shit just happens. Yeah, there was a period where I would joke the Gods were Greek and that they took particular joy in trying to make my life as miserable as possible, but ornery me decided I’d just laugh at them and keep trying my best to piss them off and . . . I think I eventually won. Life is pretty good right now!
So imagine what went through my head when, last Saturday when Ann and I headed into Zevenaar to go food shopping and we saw, parked in the parking lot, a Springfield Oregon Police cruiser.
I’ll tell you - it went from “WTF?” to “That can’t be!” to “Who told the cops we had absconded to Holland?” to “Is someone, or some thing, trying to send us a message?” I dismissed the latter two almost immediately. The first two lingered for quite some time.
After parking our car we walked over to check out the vehicle. US police cruisers often look alike and . . . it couldn’t really be a Springfield Oregon police cruiser, it had to be from somewhere else? Sure enough though, there was a reason it looked so familiar - that’s the Springfield Oregon Drift Boat on the McKenzie River logo painted on the doors. Go figure!
Ann and I walked around it a bit, laughing to see a Springfield police cruiser in Zevenaar, Netherlands. Our nephew Carlos has assured us that it was a Springfield police cruiser, but also said that several of the stickers are not official, some come from other departments, and . . the flags are on wrong. Still, we were right, it is a Springfield, Oregon cop car.
Unfortunately, as we were walking out of Albert Hein (one of the two grocery stores we hit . . . I guess I should say, shopped at) the cruiser was driving away and we didn’t get to talk with the owner. I suspect they would have loved to know we come from the same town her/his car came from. Alas, it was not to be.
But the story doesn’t end there.
The next day, having forgotten an important ingredient for that night’s dinner, I ran back over to Zevenaar. This time, however, the parking lot was near full (some downtown event I think). So I drove around the lot and saw a space. As I drove up to it, low and behold, guess who I parked next to.
Hummmmm . . . . . . . Maybe someone is trying to tell me something?