Tag Archives: kidnapping

Declare

Declare: (v) to make known or state clearly

Rolling up to the border crossing in Detroit, between Canada and the United States, the agent behind the glass window said:

“Anything to declare?”

I didn’t know what he meant.

I was twenty-one years old, driving a beat-up brown van, with long hair laying on my shoulders. I felt completely normal. I think he feared I was less-than-average.

I said, “What do you mean?”

The simple asking of that question caused him to leave his booth, come out and demand that I open the rear end of my van.

I did.

I innocently thought, “What’s the big deal?”

But what he saw, as a Canadian official, were two young girls, resting in sleeping bags, some electronic equipment, and brown boxes. He was suspicious.

I think he thought I was hauling the trifecta: kidnapping women, stealing stereos, and shipping drugs.

We were required to open everything.

When it was discovered there was nothing of interest, he found a reason to object. You see, in the boxes were the record albums we sold at our gigs. I was ignorant of the fact that Canada wanted to put a surcharge on any record album coming across their border, that was going to be sold at a live concert.

Worse was the fact that the surcharge for each album was $2.85.

Not only did we not have the money for the surcharge, but none of us had seen that sum of money for a long time.

I begged.

I gave my full lineage and testimony.

I even tried to declare things he didn’t ask me to declare.

He was not interested.

We were rejected at the Canadian border.

Yet we were supposed to do a Canadian tour.

Leaving that station, we stopped at a coffee shop about two miles down the road, still itchy and bitchy from our encounter. Our waiter explained that the Detroit crossing was very difficult—asking you to declare every little thing. But if we drove up the road about eighty miles, there was a crossing that was much easier.

I thanked him.

We got in the van and decided to take the chance that our food-getter knew what he was talking about.

Arriving at the gate, we pulled up slowly. There was nobody around. It was just a little building—big enough to hold ten toy soldiers.

When we stopped the van, though, a man came running up from a nearby grove of trees with his dog in tow.

“Ay!” he said. “Sorry I wasn’t at my post. Had to go take a piss.”

He looked at me. I looked at him.

I was waiting for him to ask me to declare.

He didn’t.

I got out, petted his dog, told him I was a musician—and he said he was a budding songwriter himself.

He patted me on the shoulder, I got back in the van, he waved his hand, and said, “Go on through—hope you enjoy us.”

Now, I have two thoughts about this story:

Sometimes a music group is just a music group and you should leave them the hell alone.

But sometimes people in vans in the middle of the night need to do more than just pet your dog.

 

Amber Alert

dictionary with letter A

Amber Alert: (n) an emergency response system that disseminates information about a missing person (usually a child) by media broadcasting or electronic roadway signs.

All right. Get ready to buy me the T-shirt.

I guess it should read, “I am an unfeeling, anti-American, cynical unbeliever.”

Maybe it’s because I’ve done some follow-up on the concept of Amber Alerts. Even though there are many television shows that make hay off of children being abducted by strangers who torture and murder them, most of the kidnapping of little ones in our country is done by either the mother or the father, who no longer love each other and have decided to turn the child into the hunk of meat which they steal from the barn and hustle away through the woods.

If it weren’t so sad and pathetic, it would nearly be comical. We have actually created a system of marriage in this country which at least half of the time ends up in divorce, while contending that when it comes to the realm of the children, the couple is still together–even though they’ve moved on to other relationships, and now, because of human nature, are trying to prove to the children that this person is now their enemy and how much better off they would be if they didn’t have that rotten sperm donor or womb carrier.

Did you follow that?

In other words, like we always do in this country, we think we can establish a family, destroy it, pretend that it still exists, and then act alarmed when one of the parents steals the child, which sends out an Amber Alert and makes everyone concerned about their own offspring, when it really is just a Hatfield and McCoy feud.

There are exceptions, and for that reason, the Amber Alert should not be removed from our everyday lives.

But keep in mind–most of these are people who are fighting with each other, who once made love and produced a child, who has become at times little more than a bargaining chip.

Here’s the real Amber Alert, and may it sound out over the airwaves and be flashed on the freeways:

If you’re going to have children, try to keep your marriage together, and if you don’t stay together, please remember–and Solomon was wise enough to know this:

You can’t cut a kid in two.