Memoir & Why I Do It

Here in West Seattle we have a wonderful spot called C & P Coffee Company. In this welcoming environment, PoetryBridge hosts monthly events with featured readers and a community mic organized by Leopoldo Seguel. More recently, Leopoldo has launched PoetryBridge Times. I am grateful to him for publishing this piece and happy to share it with you.

         A while back, I was driving home to Seattle from eastern Washington with my sisters. I sat in the back seat. As we drove over Snoqualmie Pass and started the descent into the Puget Sound lowlands, I noticed two police vehicles parked in an open area, perhaps a weigh station parking lot, to the north of the highway. One was an SUV, the other a sedan. Both were black. They were parked head-to-head with the drivers’ windows aligned. The SUV was on the highway side, almost blocking the view of the sedan.

         “Looks like that’s where the cops take a break,” I said.

         “But there’s no donut shop around,” said my sister, the one riding shotgun.

         We laughed and thought nothing more of it.

         Five minutes down the road, a police SUV passed on our left. A moment later they’d pulled someone over.

         “Where’d that guy come from?” I wondered.

         “Same one we just saw,” my sister said.

         “No way. The parked cars were black. That one’s white.”

         “No,” my sister said. “It’s the same white SUV.”

         So what happened? The paint color of the cop cars obviously hadn’t changed, so one of us had to be wrong. Was it her or me? Was the white SUV the same vehicle we’d seen parked or another? Was it possible that when we joked about donuts, my sister and I were actually looking at different cars?  Read more...