It was an impromptu moment, one I miss most of all. Running errands - that is, picking up BDU pants to wear test - I stopped at a nationally-recognized coffee shop for a salad. It wasn't hard to pick out the unmarked supervisor's cars in the lot.
My friends sat at an outdoor table, relaxed. I went over, intent on saying hi and moving on. I had things to do.
"Sit down," one of them said. "Let me buy you a cup."
We have been work friends for years, he and I. Once, thirty or more years ago, he and I disarmed a man with a gun who had forced his way into an apartment and was beating a woman with a telephone. We still chuckle about that, how the guy had planned to be gone when the police showed up. Big mistake.
The three of us, sergeants all, talked about the things police supervisors discuss. Rumors, gossip... Families and friends. The good times. One excused himself for a meeting.
"I'll get the shield back to the station," he said as he left.
"We just came from talking a suicidal guy with a gun out of a hotel room," my friend said. "I wonder how many of these people know what we really do."
Not many, we decided. By design.
America - big cities and small towns, industrial states or ranches and farms. It works because there are men and women willing to do things in the service of their communities. Firefighters, nurses, dispatchers. City workers, transportation departments. People who answer calls for services large and small. Many citizens, perhaps most, don't know what the average officer does. And, that's good.
I stood talking yesterday to a former co-worker who took a job with a local fire department. Her last duty day they'd made almost twenty runs. She'd gotten four hours of sleep over her twenty-four hour shift. She wasn't complaining. She and her wife have a kiddo. The schedule works for them
Who really knows what first responders do?
Those three guys in uniform sitting at a table, drinking coffee...two of them fresh from convincing a guy that his life was still worth living. The one guy in the soft uniform thirty-nine years removed from his first day "on the job" who trains the next generation, the ones who will pick up the shield when we have had enough.
All day long.
The picture? That's New York police officer Jesse Ferriera Cavallo. All she did was leap thirty feet from an overpass to save a young boy...while off duty. That's all.
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