My Brush With The Law, or Just Another Story To Tell the Kids

In the summer of 1978, I was 24 years old and living more or less happily with my boyfriend in a subsidized apartment just off the ninth hole of the municipal golf course. The rent might have been cheap but the view was million-dollar, extending due east over the rolling greens to the shiny skyscrapers of downtown. In the winter the sunrises were gorgeous, and I presumed, without any personal experience, that the same was true for summer. My kitchen walls were covered in bright floral wallpaper and the tangerine couch in the living room was a hand-me-down from my mother, whose zest for colour turned the suburban bungalow of my childhood from white to pink, then turquoise before finally settling on bright yellow.

I sewed my own clothes from McCall's patterns ('Make it Tonight, Wear it Tomorrow!'), was nice to my neighbours and called my mother at least once a day. I took in a stray cat, was good at my job – good enough to be promoted to Manager until it was discovered that managing the office and managing my arrival time were two separate skill sets – and went to the library once a week, on average. If occasionally I gave crazy drivers the finger or got a warning to pay my overdue heating bill, it wasn't because I was a bad person.

So when a knock at the door one evening interrupted our dinner, I was a little surprised to find two cops standing in the hallway. They eyed me sceptically,

"Deborah Soooodoool?"

"Sudul. It rhymes with poodle. And noodle."

"Oh, we're in the right place then." They both laughed. "We were expecting somebody East Indian." There was really nothing to say to that, so I laughed along with them.

"Looks like you've got a few parking tickets outstanding," said the red-headed one. He looked at a paper in his hand. "Well, more than a few. Nineteen, actually, as of the beginning of this year. Would that be right?"

Well, damn, that would be right.

When the weather was fine, I rode my motorcycle to work because it was fun and cheap and because there was a little space where I could leave it for free behind the office. But when it turned wet or cold, I took the car and played hide and seek with the parking cops, ducking out of the office every few hours to move the car or plug the meter with a couple of quarters. At least twice a month I'd find a ticket under the windshield wiper. The best thing about that was that if I left it there, I was good for the rest of the day. Procrastination ran interference with my best intentions, and tossing the ticket in the glove box put off the annoyance and financial pain of putting a cheque in the mail. It also made it easier to forget.

The two cops seemed to be waiting for me to do something. "Maybe you'd like to get your purse?" the redhead prompted.

"Pardon me?"

"You might want to have that with you when you come downtown. This," he waved the paper at me, "is a warrant for your arrest. ""

He couldn't be serious. I started to laugh, in that hiccup-py kind of way you do when it's involuntary and inappropriate.

The boyfriend offered up some reasonable points about wasted taxpayer money and having bigger fish to fry. We all agreed that this attention on me and my tickets was ridiculous and laughed together as one. I was almost convinced that this jollity would put an end to the whole thing and I could go back to my supper. What it actually meant was that I found myself in the back seat of a police cruiser without any inside door handles.

I hoped my neighbours were blind or completely incurious and slunk down as we drove off, only to stop a few blocks away at a house where a woman was mowing the lawn. Red and his partner got out to talk to her but soon enough, they came back to the car and she resumed her mowing. Red volunteered that she too had a bunch of unpaid fines.

"But she swears that she paid them all yesterday. " He rolled his eyes. "Now, if you'd told us that, we would have given you the benefit of the doubt," he said, helpfully, "at least until tomorrow. I'd put ten bucks on her being at city hall paying them first thing in the morning."

"Really," I said.

It was a windy evening and on the way downtown a big gust blew through the car, scattering papers out the window and over six lanes of traffic, which I took to be a direct intervention from Above. Red's partner threw on the brakes and they both jumped out to chase after their errant paperwork, while I crossed my fingers that the one with my name on it would get sucked into an updraft. Red's triumphant face told me it had not.

We pulled up in the alley behind the police station. The back door had none of the 'Serve and Protect' PR of the public entrance and I started to feel a bit sick. Red brought out a pair of handcuffs – "It's just standard procedure, nothing personal" – and only reluctantly relented when I promised him I'd go along peaceably. Riding up to the fourth floor in an elevator smelling of pee sucked the last bit of humour out of me and when the doors opened to a room full of cops and Red crowing, "Look who we've got!", I thought I might die.

The woman behind the thick glass partition itemized the contents of my purse and when I balked at giving her my scarf, said drily, "We don't want you to hang yourself, honey." Bail was set at $75. I called the boyfriend, who didn't have the cash. The only good thing about that was that I'd already used up my one phone call and it was he who had to call my mother. I didn't know which was worse – being in jail, or being a disappointment.

I was frisked by a matron who clucked disapprovingly over the reason for my visit and led me to a big cell holding half a dozen women, most of whom seemed to be under the influence of substances I generally avoided. Matron took pity on me when I started to cry and put me in a single cell instead, with a sink, a toilet with no seat and a mattress I didn't dare sit on. Smoking was allowed, but I had to make an official request for a light.

After four hours of solitary confinement that felt like twenty-four, my bail was finally processed, but not before I had re-examined my attitudes about the nature of crime and punishment. From the other side of the fence, it seemed like a silly idea to put procrastinators like me, or for that matter, anybody who hadn't actually hurt anyone, in jail. Fraudsters, vandals, petty thieves – surely society would be better served if these people did something useful like painting a community centre or reading to the blind. After reimbursing their victims, of course.

But I have to admit that my time in the slammer made me resolve to do better. I vowed to get up early enough to take the bus to work. To stop procrastinating – about everything. To use the glove box only for Kleenex and the tire pressure gauge. And failing that, to always have bail in my pocket.

Read More

Take Me Home, James

A few days ago, I left home in Canada to come home... to France. Sort of.

As almost everyone with even a smattering of French knows, there is no equivalent word in the land of Baudelaire, baguettes and bisous sur la joue for 'home'. Although foyer seems to come close, it is clinical in its lack of warmth and inclusion, and while the casual chez moi is widely understood to mean the physical structure where one lives, or even the feeling of being in a welcoming environment, it does not have the profound significance of a place where one truly belongs. That such a place might be where a childhood was spent, where independence flourished and new roots took hold, or some enveloping comfort was found resists generalization.

When I am asked where my home is, I avoid the automatism of answering that it is Canada. That isn't where I spend most of my time, and it isn't where I have invested my emotional life as half of a committed couple. But that's where I feel most at ease: where customs and language are familiar, where I know how to read the body language, where I have a long history and a lot of people I love live. If the question is put to me in the company of my favourite Belgian, I hesitate to discourage him from believing that I am just as at home here in France with him, but the truth is, if it weren't for love, I wouldn't be here.

Every emigrant experiences loss. For some, it is personal and terrible, but in even the most wished-for, non-conflict-driven emigrant experience there is the potential of loss of cultural belonging, of linguistic ease, of meaningful community contact and of shared history. Little wonder that, in countries of significant immigration, cultural enclaves form and solidify in the inestimable comfort of familiarity. In the region of southern France where I live there are clubs for almost every nationality, and some new residents come here simply to enjoy the climate and geography in the company of their own kind, without any intention to assimilate into local life or learn the language beyond the basics.

This is my second experience at living as an immigrant – both times in the same country – and I continue to have difficulty establishing this lovely place as my home. The fact that my children are in that other place is certainly a factor, but my first time around they were here with me – all of them French-born – and I was still not able to settle. Maybe it's because I'm female, and my attachment to place and community of origin is harder to sever; many men do not develop the close friendships that are so important to women's sense of community and I've heard more than one man say that his home is just where he happens to be. According to the highly unscientific survey I have conducted of ex-patriates over my fourteen-odd years in France, men have an easier time of adapting to a new place, particularly if the motivation for their relocation is professional. For many women, including me, the best we can do is to consider our adopted country/city/state/province a 'home away from home', which seems a little unconvincing.

If I were to furnish the 'inner home' that William Bridges suggests in his book 'Transitions' is the ideal place to live, and of which I recently read at SpitandBalingWire (a soon-to-be émigrée herself) then perhaps I'd feel more grounded. But how can I do that? I appreciate each 'home' for very different reasons, and don't spend my time pining for what I don't have, at least not too often, but I can't seem to get to the point where I am truly chez moi.

 My admiration for forward-looking immigrants who leave familiarity behind and determine to lay down roots and history in a new country is boundless. In blogs that I have come across, there are some notable examples of people who have thrown appreciative arms around a culture, language and way of life entirely different than what they previously knew. Friko, Owen and a Cuban in London are long-time, well-integrated ex-patriates and Ginnie is an intrepid American sexagenarian who took up residence in Holland a month ago.

When my plane touched down in Nice last Monday, I wanted to feel a kind of settling, a rightness that told me I was where I should be, but for as long as my life straddles an ocean, I doubt that I will feel that fully in either place. But it occurred to me before I left Canada this time that although my life can hardly be called nomadic, I have something in common with that way of life. Despite their transience, nomads maintain cultural and affective ties by travelling in communities, and since I began to write in this space, the friends I have made come with me wherever I go.

Read More