I took my son and his friend to a restaurant that specializes in ice cream. They have one item in particular made of soft serve mixed with an assortment of toppings. Their gimmick is to turn the cup upside down as they present it to the customer to demonstrate how thick their ice cream is.

My son’s friend had never been there and didn’t know this. As the girl behind the counter handed him his ice cream, she turned it upside down. It must have been mixed wrong or something, because it was watery and his ice cream was poured out onto the counter.

The poor kid had no idea what just happened. From his perspective, she walked up to him, smiled, and dumped out his ice cream!

In the late 1970s, my partner and I were sworn federal investigators with a then-obscure federal law enforcement agency. As befitted our low budget, our official government vehicles were a bunch of very un-cop-like AMC Hornet sedans, obtained when the federal government bailed out a failing automaker. We wore plain suit coats and ties, and our vehicles were unmarked.  

One afternoon while returning to our office in Norfolk, we approached a stoplight on a public street and stopped. An obviously de-commissioned Virginia State Police trooper-car, still with its door mount spotlight and a cheap mono-color repaint, pulled up alongside us. The driver was obviously a young Navy sailor, wearing a wife beater T-shirt and dark sunglasses.  

The light changed, and we drove up the street to the next light. All the while, the sailor behind the shades was giving us the once-over and scowling at us. At the next stoplight, the sailor in the ex-cop car again glared at us, resting his left hand on the spotlight control, giving an unconvincing impression of a real law-man.  

All at once, my partner burst out laughing. He explained that our sailor, while still glaring at us, reached down and brought something to his mouth and began talking into… his seat belt buckle!

As the light changed, my partner reached down, tapped the yelp button on our siren just once and grabbed our real microphone. Over the car’s loud-hailer, he called out, “Better re-buckle that seatbelt, sailor.”  

As we pulled away, this embarrassed cop-wannabe hit his brakes and pulled over to the side as we quietly drove away.

Decades ago, when I was in first grade, I met a girl who lived on the same county road, not too far away. We became best friends, and I often visited and played with her at her house. She, her mother and father, and even her young siblings — she was the oldest child — all spoke quite loudly with each other, almost shouting. She very seldom was allowed to visit me at my house which, even at that young age, I thought was odd. One day while playing she asked if I would like to spend the night. I said I’d have to ask my parents and she said she’d first ask her mom if it was okay. As we were walking toward the garden where her mother was working, the mother looked up just as I said something to my friend. I was, and still am, pretty soft-spoken, and she apparently didn’t hear what I said to her daughter. She jerked upright, raised the shovel she was using in the air, and ran at me, swinging it in front of her and shouting, “We don’t whisper at this house! Get out of my yard; get out of my yard now!” I turned and ran all the way home, hysterically crying, but wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened, as I thought I’d done something horrendously wrong! Ironically, what I’d said was that my friend’s mother was very pretty!

I didn’t go back to that house, although we still played together at school, and shortly after that incident her family moved further away from town to what I was told was a larger farm. My friend changed schools and I no longer saw her. Years later we met at high school orientation — there was only one in town, fed by several elementary and two junior high schools — and talked a bit. She invited me to visit and spend the night. Remembering what had happened the last time I’d been to her house, I was very hesitant but she insisted, saying her mother was sorry, it was all a misunderstanding, and that she didn’t have many friends and would really like to reconnect. I finally, reluctantly, agreed to go.

I arrived in time for dinner, remembered to raise my voice when I was speaking, and the evening was pretty uneventful. Then morning happened. With no discussion or warning that this was the norm, the alarm went off at 4:00 am, and the house came to life. Everyone quickly dressed and headed to a large barn so I accompanied them.

I was raised on a small farm with daily chores, but this seemed ridiculously early. We had a few cows, and I’d learned to milk them by hand into a bucket but, unbeknownst to me until that very moment, this was a large commercial type operation with more than 200 cows, several milking machines, and a huge holding tank. I had no idea how to help, so I stayed in a corner out of the way and watched. My friend would wash and inspect each cow’s udder, hook up and unhook the machine, check the milk for discoloration or impurities, then throw the valve to empty the milk collected into the larger tank. I was beginning to think that I could do that part, so I started to move forward to offer to help. Her father suddenly started screeching and berating her; she was working too slowly, and he believed she had missed the signs that one of the cows had an infection in one of her teats and she’d allowed that cow’s milk to flow into the main tank causing contamination — it was scratched but not infected, and she’d treated it with salve as she’d been taught. Then he turned on me because I wasn’t helping, should have been aware of the potential problem from across the room and hadn’t said anything, and was totally useless and should never have been invited to stay the night if I wasn’t willing to jump in and get down and dirty with the family.

I don’t remember if I even stayed to eat breakfast before I left, and I never had any desire whatsoever to go back, I didn’t have any classes with my former friend and we didn’t have much opportunity to speak. She left the school a few months later, and I don’t know if the family moved again, if she transferred to a different school district, or if she dropped out, although I suspect the latter. I felt bad for the children in that family, as it seemed to me the only reason they were allowed to have any “friends” at all is so they could act as additional free labor. Thinking back on it in later years, I realized that those children were in an abusive household, both physical and mental, and I hope that they were able to move on as adults to live more “normal” lives.

My mother told me about an experience one of her coworkers had.

The coworker had diabetes before she got pregnant. Her doctor considered her case high-risk, and sent her to another office in the city for some blood work. She had a referral, and all of the necessary info was sent to the office so that these blood tests could be performed. It was supposed to be an in-and-out procedure.

When she got there, the main doctor of this practice was quite curt with her, almost rude. At first she just chalked it up to him being in a bad mood, or needing to learn better bedside manners. Then, he told her, “You know, people like you shouldn’t be getting pregnant.”

She immediately asked what he meant by that. He went on to explain that people with certain health conditions, such as her diabetes, should not be reproducing. She responded that she was there for blood work, and then she was leaving; if he had any personal concerns, she wasn’t interested in hearing them.

The doctor waved her off and told her that she needed to sign some paperwork. She asked what paperwork, as her regular office should have sent her information over. He wouldn’t answer her and just kept pushing the papers at her, telling her to sign. Finally, she took the paperwork and started reading it.

The doctor was trying to force her into signing off for an abortion.

She immediately called her regular doctor and told him what was going on. Her doctor told her to drop everything, and get out of there. Just get up, and walk out, right now. She did.

Her regular doctor apologized profusely and told her he had no idea what the other doctor was up to. He told her he was going to report the practice, and asked if she wanted to lodge a complaint. She did.

The next day, the other doctor’s practice was shut down, and he lost his license. Apparently he had been doing this to other women, and he was taking it upon himself to decide who was — or was not — “worthy” to reproduce or get pregnant.

In the late 1990s to early 2000s, I was a tech at a small computer store. A woman brought in her malfunctioning computer and paid a rush charge to have it looked at right away. While I was checking her machine in, she was going on and on about being an attorney and needing the computer fixed quickly to be able to serve her clients. I handed her our standard disclaimer about data loss, etc., and asked her to sign.

Before I could finish explaining what it was, she grabbed my pen, signed the form without looking at it, and walked off.

I made note of her name in case I ever needed an attorney, so I could remember not to use her.