Dad's in the Highway Patrol

Our youngest daughter was married on Saturday of a Labor Day Weekend. Every t was crossed and every i was dotted, when suddenly, two days before the wedding --- Grandma died! It was too late to cancel the wedding and honeymoon, so everything went ahead with, of course, the exception of Grandma. The next day was Sunday and you can't skip church right after they have provided a lovely wedding for your daughter, so we went to church and then headed thirty miles south to Grampa's church for the funeral. Our pastor preached his normal length sermon and that put us a little behind in getting to the other church ontime. As we were speeding southward on I-75 with our son following closely behind, we were stopped by an Ohio Highway Patrolman for speeding and for following too closely. The officer was polite, but was one of those "by the book" types. We explained that we were late for my husband's mother's funeral (it was really a step-mother), we had the interrment papers with us and his elderly father would be worried to death ---- could he please speed up the process for giving us the dreaded ticket? "No, please stay in your cars until I call this in!" How many people are speeding down the highway on Labor Day Sunday in suits, ties, church dresses and high heels? Most people are in beach clothes and have a six pak in the back seat. No matter what we said, he went slower and slower, even saying that he would have to start all over at the beginning, because we bothered him. Eventually, we took our tickets and drove the rest of the way. We were late, but it didn't make Grandma any deader and everything worked out in the end. The honeymooning couple had stayed in that town over night, so they could get to the funeral and then be on their way to their new life as Mr. and Mrs. (Our daughter had actually gone to the funeral home the day before, after the reception in her wedding gown, so her Grampa could see her in her bridal gown.)

I immediately sat down and sent a letter of complaint to the head of the Ohio Highway Patrol --- not because of the tickets, but because of the length of time we were detained on the roadside. I even included the death notice and the wedding announcement from the paper, feeling that a little compassion would have gone a long way in our case. We might have even made it to the church ontime.

The happy couple came back from their honeymoon just in time to have a sergeant from the Patrol come to our house to get the whole story. He had actually timed the trip from our country home to the other town to see what time we should have left to make the trip in reasonable time for the funeral. The only catch was---- we didn't leave from our home ---- we left from our church service. My new son-in-law was so impressed with the sergeant that when a new class was held in Columbus, he joined the Highway Patrol and has been with them for twenty-five years. He can retire next month and will be in great demand as an accident reconstructionist or stay in as a sergeant and have his retirement go into an IRA. He is only forty-eight and already has one career behind him and almost anything ahead of him. His college degree was in marketing and he wound up in law enforcement, because we were stopped for speeding the day after his wedding. God leads us along in mysterious ways, sometimes He has a great sense of humor. The little guy in the picture is my grandson, Alex in his dad's Stetson. He is now a junior at Nyack University in New York and is inclined either towards videography for Christian movies or perhaps a preacher. Either way, his dad's in the Highway Patrol and a really great guy.