Radar detector

For many years my husband’s vehicle had a radar detector, and whenever I borrowed his car I unplugged it. The radar detector sounded an obnoxious alarm whenever it detected radar beams. My husband liked the alarm; he had a lead foot. He drove fast. He had to budget for speeding tickets because he got stopped, even with the alarm, every few months.

To be fair, he drove an hour each way to work for many years, with longer trips on National Guard weekends. He volunteered to cook at an armory three hours away, once a month for over a year. For Christmas that year he and I drove to that armory for their Christmas party, and then stayed in a hotel room. That was the first time I heard of “fuzzy navel”; apparently they put some form of alcohol into orange juice and served it, with ice cubes, in an enormous steam table pan. A less elegant way to serve it I could hardly imagine.

At one time we lived in Akron, Ohio, and he worked in downtown Cleveland. He drove the interstate and I’m certain he rarely drove as low as the actual speed limit. There was one half-mile stretch where he always slowed way down. When I asked, he said, “There’s a municipality along this highway that has this half-mile stretch within their borders, but no exits or entrances to the highway. They pay a cop to sit on this stretch and pick up speeders. I was stopped a couple months ago, at night. The cop directed me to a courtroom in the town, where they had a judge and a clerk, accepting credit card payments of fines on the spot. They fund a lot of their city costs this way.” I was astonished; cash or check were the default ways to pay for things.