I have been provided with a variety of equipment to use when I go out to probationers' residences to conduct home visits, including a Kevlar vest. Sure, Kevlar is great protection against a bullet to the torso, but I hate wearing my vest. It's bulky, it's awkward, it's uncomfortable, I look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy when I have it on, and worst of all, it's miserably hot. By the end of a 70-degree day of home visits, I'm drenched in sweat. In the dead of summer, I'm pretty sure my internal organs have been pressure-cooked by the end of a shift. And those who know me know that I absolutely loathe being hot.
So I've been getting a little sloppy about wearing my vest lately. (Sorry, Mom!) My home visits have been concentrated in the county in which I work, which is half rural, half suburban, mostly laid back. That's not to say that bad things don't happen around here, but it's pretty uncommon to see anything on the local news coming out of our county.
I also like to think that I have a pretty disarming style when I'm out on home visits. I do everything I can with my body language, choice of words, tone of voice, facial expressions, etc. to put everyone in the home at ease, even as I'm confiscating their drugs, alcohol, firearms, or whatever else I find in there that's going to send them to jail. I'm also extremely particular about who I take with me as a partner. There are a small handful of people in my office who I'm comfortable with in the field, and I pretty much just stick with them.
So I figure with all of that going for me, why subject myself to a day full of heat-related misery, when the chances of me needing the Kevlar are minuscule, right?
I know, I know. That's how officers get killed. Getting complacent. But did I mention how much I hate my vest?
Yesterday, my partner and I were planning to do some home visits in a fairly nasty part of Indianapolis. Unfortunately, the temperatures were predicted to hit the mid- to high-80's, with considerable humidity. Despite the exponential increase in risk, based simply on the area we were headed to, I was still contemplating not wearing my vest. It was going to be absolutely miserable wearing it in that kind of weather.
But then I got a sign from above, delivered by Olivia.
As I was getting her ready for school yesterday morning, she observed that some of the flowers in our garden were gone. I confirmed her observation and told her that the flowers were dead. Then came the question I wasn't prepared for.
"Daddy? What does 'dead' mean?"
I did my best to explain in 4-year-old terms that "dead" means that someone or something isn't with us anymore, but they've gone to heaven, and they're watching us from way up high in the sky. I was mentally high-fiving myself after that answer. Not bad for having to completely pull that one out of the thin air at a moment's notice!
"So the flowers are in heaven?" she asked.
"Yes, they are," I said.
"So Bronson [our dog that we had to euthanize a couple months ago] is in heaven?" she asked.
"Yes, he is," I said.
Olivia pondered that for a moment or two, and then uttered one of those sentences that changes a person's course of action.
"Daddy? I don't want you to be dead."
Two hours later, as I was strapping my Kevlar vest on, that sentence was running over and over again through my head. As I boiled like a lobster all day, that sentence was going through my head. As I was desperately trying to cool down for hours after work, cranking up the air conditioning, sitting in front of a fan, taking a cold shower, downing Gatorade like it was going out of style...that sentence was going through my head.
The story would have been made-for-TV material if I had gotten shot yesterday, and the Kevlar vest stopped the bullet. But that didn't happen. Nothing even remotely close to a confrontation ever happened, and my partner and I made it back to the office completely intact.
And yet my four-year-old daughter managed to correct weeks of sloppiness on my part in one short, well-timed sentence.
Kids say the darndest things.
wow.
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