He made the call that saved my Benadryl.

The booty from the Scamp bust.

Thump thump thump.  It’s 5:38 a.m. “Louisville police.” Thump thump thump.
I’m dreaming of something scary anyhow so this pounding on my door at the Baymont Inn sort of blends in and it takes awhile for Louisville’s finest to rouse me. As the fog lifts, the first thing I think is, “did I do something?” Seriously. I run my night of baseball watching and BBQ eating through my brain.
“Lori? You in there? We need you to open the door.” I think it over. My conscience is clean. Colby, my watch dog, is still asleep—we have a king-sized bed with feather pillows, so, count him out for anything.
“Okay, I need to see badges,” I say, looking through the peephole (through which, in truth, I can see nothing but I want to sound like I know how this is done.)
“We’re in uniform, ma’am.”
“Right.” I open the door. The police in Louisville, Kentucky—at least the ones who draw the overnight shift on a Sunday–are apparently all fresh-faced, young, competent, and just totally adorable. In the next 30 minutes I’ll meet about 10 of them and they will all be so nice and good looking and, like, capable and focused and everything, I will want to be protected by them always. I don’t think the pair at my door smile as I stand there in my jammies but even hours later, I recall a sense of wanting to invite them in for a PJ party.
Anyhow, the crime: I’m in a city, so, I had taken a motel room and parked my Scamp out back, where it would be safe.
“Someone broke into your trailer, ma’am, and we need you to come see if you can identify any of the stuff the perpetrator took from it.” I can’t be certain they said “perpetrator” but anyhow, they tell me they got the guy; he’s been arrested and is outside. A trucker who had been sleeping in his cab saw someone climbing into my trailer and called 911; a couple minutes later it was over.
The burglar is sitting on the curb in the parking lot, cuffed. He is gangly and lean. Down there so near the ground, his knees seem to be up around his ears. He is in his burglar outfit: all black clothes, hoodie up over his head, black shoes. He is clean-shaven and young and makes me think of my students, sort of a young dopey kid with a hangdog expression. He says, “I’m real sorry that I done got you up out of bed, ma’am.”
I don’t really know what to say to this. It can’t have totally sunk in that he is going to jail now. I want to say something; I want to interview him, actually. But standing out back of the camper at 5:41 a.m., seeing that all he took from me was a box of Benadryl, and seeing that every police car in the city seems to have come down here because my Scamp—so easily violated, but don’t worry, I fixed that—has been burglarized, and the excellent servants of Louisville cannot let that stand… seeing this scene, what I feel is pity. Really.
I want to say I feel sorrow or anger or even curiosity and that I feel the perpetrator is worth a few questions on my recorder (which, with camera and notebook, reflexively I brought outside) but that is not how I feel. I just think this is pathetic. One of the cops even says that if I plan to write about this, I ought to add a chase and a shootout.
“These your things ma’am?” an officer asks.
“Yes—that’s my Benadryl, and that’s my jewelry bag.” The mention of the jewelry bag, which is empty, creates a flurry of activity and some shouts and various threats to the burglar idiot to cough up what he’s obviously hiding but, as it turns out, he didn’t take my jewelry. Just the bag. The jewelry is still in the trailer.
“It’s not like there was nothing in it worth much,” he says. “Nothin’ personal about your jewelry, ma’am.”
The police took him away, presumably to book him and for him to then enter a plea, presumably guilty, and then presumably for him to bargain his way back out of the charges so that he will be free to try this again and next time, he’ll be more careful, I should think. The police wrap things up and I am left there feeling like it should not seem so petty, and so pointless, stealing little pills to make harder drugs from them (because methamphetamine comes from cold pills, as surely we all know by now). I am left there thinking that even I could be more criminal than that.
I felt sad for hours. Then it was time to move on.