People used to ask me if I worried that he was a policeman. I never did. I knew he was smart and quick. He could size up a situation in a split second.
He had a common sense about things in general.
He would say, "WWJD?"
Meaning "What would Jimmy do?" A few people including my sister had the pleasure of riding with him as a guest of the city when he was on duty. It's an experience that she said was amazing and thrilling. He had to arrest a guy that day who tried to resist and Jimmy had him down eating gravel and cuffed before she could blink!
His first night on duty in a bad section of north Jacksonville was on New Years Eve.
They were instructed to stay in their police cars and wear their riot gear. These folks don't shoot off pretty fireworks! The next morning he showed me the bullet hole that pierced the hood just in front of the driver seat! Lucky.
Police work is the only thing he ever really wanted to do. He just had to take a twenty year detour!
We went to Sonny's barbecue one Sunday a few years later. As we were eating he said, " I think we should sell the house." Boom, there it was. I almost choked!
"No, not now, not after all this work!" But after awhile it started to make more sense that we should. We needed the college tuition and Jimmy could be assigned a police car if we lived in Duval County and he would not have to commute so far to get a pool car and return it everyday and then drive the extra miles home. "Ok, we'll sell the house." Five years. It was the longest in one place we had been in a long time. I didn't want to go back after that. I would cry every time I would drive by our beautiful home we built together. We sold just prior to the housing bubble burst. We were lucky again!
No comments:
Post a Comment