last night i made a quick stop in o’bryonville to find this year’s obligatory coworker christmas gifts. i plugged the meter (giving myself 38 minutes even though i only needed 32 — you know, just to be safe — and reminding myself in the process that CHEAP PARKING METERS is reason #312 why we love cincinnati) and proceeded to browse the local shops. i was finally successful in margot madison’s creative stationery store, where i found packages of clever post-it notes that were alternately sassy, gripey and just plain fun. voila: the perfect gifts for desk-jockeys.
after returning to the car and driving a bit i noticed a bit of flapping paper on the passenger-side windshield. my first thought was that it was a flyer, so i ignored it. then, when paused at a red light, i read the heading (backwards though it was) and identified the word “police.” merry effing christmas to me, i thought: a parking ticket. lovely.
it wasn’t until getting home that i realized what the piece of paper actually was: a friendly, very nicely-mannered warning from the local patrol that leaving a box for a cd player sitting in the back seat of my car could be construed by the criminally-inclined as an invitation to theft. never mind that the box was empty. my local constabulary was simply concerned that my car not be broken into, that my christmas goodies not be stolen.
the cynic in me is searching for all the hidden racial messages here. obviously only non-locals would drive to o’bryonville, for starters, and o’bryonville is pretty close to walnut hills (is it actually in walnut hills?), and, well, we all know what that means. the police are giving nice messages to wide-eyed suburban-types who come into town to shop and who aren’t savvy enough to protect themselves against the city’s unsavory element.
but the color-blind naif in me thinks it’s just really nice that somebody is looking out for cincy’s citizens.
