Story of teh Day 11/06/2008

I had lunch with my cousin, Charlotte, yesterday.
She asked me who was the disciplinarian in our house, I or Larry. I told her that it has been so long since we’ve had to do that, I am not sure. I mean,. what is the worst things my kids do, nowadays? Wear my pantyhose? Overspend at the grocery store?

Okay, they give me headaches, but outside of things that you discipline for. At least, at this point.

Then, she made a comment, that I found hard to understand. She told me that trouble followed her son.
I told her I didn’t’ get her meaning, and she told me the following story.

Her son was a teenager, 16 or 17, and he had gone off to a coffee house in Broad Ripple to meet some friends. It was past bed time and she and her husband were worried about their son…..and the worry intensified until they were frantic. And then he came home.
Of course, they wanted to know where he was.
He had been arrested and down at the police station.
After sitting with his friends for quite a while, the police came into the restaurant, and despite assurances from several people , that eh had been there for a long while, they hauled him off to downtown. They didn’t’ let him call his parents or anything, but held him for hours.
All this because his car looked like one that was reported to have been used in a robbery.

That was strange enough story, but the oddity was that when Aaron came home from school, just a couple of hours later, he told me this tale- which is kind of a slightly twisted through a mirror re-telling.

One of his friends from school had registered to help at the polls, election day. Aaron tried to do this also, at the urging of the same teacher, but was turned away, since they all ready had enough poll workers.
This young man was asked to take a stack of absentee ballots from one location to another. After he got into a cab, and was en-route, he found the cab stopped and surrounded by a SWAT team- all pointing their guns at him. He was taken from the cab, and handcuffed, without knowing why. Meanwhile, some of the ballots started floating away on eth wind- and ended up scattered in eth streets.
Luckily, at some point, the SWAT team members realized that this high school student was not the bank robber they were looking for, and they released him to go gather the scattered ballots.
Apparently, someone had wrongly reported the bank robber as having jumped into a cab near the location the young man had- when in fact, he had fled into the woods.

I am left wondering a few things. How do I end up being told these two tales only a couple of hours apart? Are these two young men somehow related? Gosh, maybe they have the same birth date or something…and is this young man’s mother going to be telling a similar story to someone about 27 years later, as a similar incident is being played out…….

I am also expecting a message to flash across the screen, at any moment, saying “Stay tuned for the next part of our story…”