Officer Alex reflects on the ways memory influences the day-to-day
I was in a restaurant last week enjoying a rare lunch that did not involve Tupperware or a hastily constructed hot dog, and I was smiling.
I was with “people.” I was eating comfort food. And I was not in uniform so I was just another customer instead of a set piece or potential target, hence the grin.
The place had actually had many names above its door over the years and as such had been significantly remodeled, but its bones were still there if you knew where to look, and look I did. Novelty items, string lights, antique license plates, and lots of paint. Which was a good thing because of the amount of blood I had seen on the wall that lead to the restrooms the first time I had been inside here years and years ago.
A bartender was standing where a corpse had been, but from no vantage point could I see the deep freezer and I have to say, I was okay with that. (We’ll just skip over that part in case you are reading this while eating as well.)
The smile though? That was real because that was all in the past, and life literally went on. There was talk of razing that building at one point because of the stigma of what happened years ago when I was unrecognizably younger, but honestly? I was glad it had survived and experienced the half dozen or so business licenses that had hung on its walls since then because we just can’t operate like that as a society.
Roadside crosses? Hastily erected memorials constructed from landscaping stones and potting soil? Perpetually faded plastic roses and solar powered garden lights? I get it. I understand the need. But at some point…you have to allow the dead to be buried and move on. Not to forget! But not to linger, not to dwell. And certainly not to wallow, no matter how incomprehensible the loss.
That’s actually what this whole town is to me. A series of crime scenes all smashed together…mile by mile, street by street. Some that made the news—national news, I mean—and others that only I know about.
Across the street I can see a hotel, but I’m the only one that knows which blood-smeared window had to be knocked out and crawled to get to someone who was admirably persistent in trying to end their own lives with what tools they had on-hand. An “intimate” crime scene I guess you could say, as compared to one time being able to identify which speck I was from the aerial footage on CNN of a much larger tragedy that took place on the interstate highway behind that same place.
But! From this same vantage point I can see where I caught my first actual “robber” as a cop. I can see where I pushed a frightened elderly woman’s car off of the roadway on a hot summers day where she had been stranded and living in fear of being hit by a random vehicle. I can see where I reunited a lost child with a parent at a convenience store across the street, and just out of view I remember taking a child away from an abusive parent.
If I make it to retirement I still think I’ll leave this town to spend my remaining time somewhere with fewer ghosts, but were I to stay? I think I’ve found that balance between Casper’s and Poltergeists.
Either way? Life goes on.
When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.