How I tried to go to prison
ON my scorecard of “life experience”, I have a glaring hole. I’ve never been in jail. I have driven by a jail, but that doesn’t count. It has been repurposed into a pizza place, if memory serves. Anyhow, I did try, once, to get into jail.
We were hiking back from Halifax, after a football game (the good old days), and the weather turned frosty. The local jail did not offer free over-nighters, despite all that I had learned from watching cartoons. We then continued hiking, through that night; something that would be rewarded with incarceration now.
So, my record remains unblemished. What brought this subject to the front burner was a news story about a lad in Cuba. He is in jail, and doesn’t seem to appreciate it, according to his mother. There are extenuating circumstances. The lad holds two passports, and I guess that you don’t get to choose the one with better accommodations, in certain places. There is a faint hope that the Canadian government will intervene, although I don’t understand why. Two passports aren’t better than one.
Bottom line: jail stays are not as glamourous as we believe, either here or in Cuba. And my lifetime of “crime without punishment” is as deserving of a literary treatment as anything authored by Dostoyevsky.
The “blue eyed hound” is here. We’re providing shelter while his real family celebrates the return of the pumpkin and the candied apple. My own guess is that the dog doesn’t care for orange gourd, and we provide a level of entertainment that better suits his temperament.
