Cazual Conversation

It’s surely cultural, surely intellectual and surely revered in many circles, but I lost the battle not to laugh when I spied the ad in Fridays’ News Herald for “The New York Miniature Book Society Collection.”

Surely this was some kind of joke.

Beneath the headline in the ad for the month-long event - that’s right, this stuff is too small to appreciate in only a week or two - was a picture of someone’s hand holding what could only be three miniature books.

They appear to be the size of sugar cubes.

I’m sure this is something important and noble, and I’ll trust readers to make me aware of that. Until then, the questions persist, namely, how on earth did this come to be?

Can you read them? Do they have little pages? Perhaps they were props in “Honey I shrunk the kids,” with Rick Moranis.

Can you check them out? Smuggle them into jails? Can we carry this over to our children and revert to smaller backpacks?

The exhibit is open at the Bay County Public Library through Jan. 4, and it is free. That matches my miniature budget just fine.

My retired colleague Claude Duncan, as many of you read in the News Herald two weeks ago, died in a car wreck recently.

His memorial was a week ago today (Saturday), at 3:30 p.m. I knew I had been asked to speak at the memorial and assumed I was one of many asked to share a few thoughts about a man who in his last years alone wrote more moving pieces than I ever contemplated putting to paper.

It wasn’t until the morning of the memorial, however, that I realized I was not one of many speakers, but was the only speaker and was tasked with eulogizing my friend, an honor I did not feel I deserved.

What to say? I was in over my head. What could I saw about Claude that people who had known him for decades did not already know?

I counseled with trusted friends and was told not to worry, a higher power would be with me that day and the words would come. I believed that.

Driving to WaterSound, wondering what the heck I could say, I saw the blue lights in my rear-view mirror. I knew I was speeding, running a little late for my engagement.

The Walton County sheriff’s deputy took my license and information, asked about the speeding, and all I could offer was that I was a little late for a memorial at which I was speaking.

“What’s your friend’s name?” she asked, having heard a litany of excuses over the years, I’m sure.

“Claude Duncan,” I replied.

“Oh,” she said slowly, “I know that name. I was one of the first ones at his wreck and helped perform CPR.”

The family did not know, at that point, what caused Claude’s death exactly. Family and friends hoped it was medical related leading to a crash, as opposed to a crash without reason that ended with his car in a tree and suffering. The Florida Highway Patrol was still working on its fatality report.

The deputy offered to me that which I could never have ascertained for myself: Her observations and experience told her that Claude probably did not died as a result of the wreck, but rather from something medically related that led to the crash.

So as my friend foretold, I was able to offer something to the family at the eulogy, something they did not already know about Claude. He died in peace.

There was a time I would have believed the entire episode to be a big coincidence. I know better now.

Every time memory fades on why so many find the Florida Highway Patrol distasteful, a fresh reminder erupts.

Thursday, subpoenaed to traffic court as a witness to a wreck, I walked in on a hearing presided over by Bob Pell.

Traffic court is generally mundane, this hearing was not.

The undisputed facts as I heard presented from the trooper and the defendant were these:

The trooper was working one of those beloved vehicle inspection checkpoints at a nice choked-up place on County 2300 near the dam at Deer Point Lake.

The woman was driving along minding her own business to take her young child to some sort of sporting event or function. The trooper saw the car and decided, in his experienced opinion, that the window tint on the passenger side window was too dark.

He approached the car and after receiving the woman’s papers (driver’s license and registration), told her to roll up her driver’s window so he could measure her window tint. The woman declined, believing it an invasion of her rights.

The trooper again asked her to roll up her driver’s window and she again declined.

At this point I’m thinking, “I bet that smart ol’ trooper went around to the passenger’s side window, measured the tint there, and wrote his ticket and she’s going to complain about that!”

No, on the side of the road with a mom and child - the wife and child of a police officer we would soon learn - he threatened to arrest her if she didn’t by God roll up the window he wanted to check.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem with the Florida Highway Patrol. It’s the attitude. The ticketed woman saw it with the arrest threat, hence her desire to have a hearing. The hearing officer saw it, as evidenced when he told the trooper he really ought to find a kinder, softer way to go about his business. I saw it as the trooper argued that he was within his rights to do it the way he did it.

Pell, not as easily sold, called it a good opportunity to research an interesting legal question: Did the trooper violate the woman’s Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination when he threatened her with arrest if she didn’t roll up her window?

At the end of the day, this is what we had: The FHP managed to alienate a woman who until the moment of that encounter was heavily inclined to support law enforcement. A hearing officer wondered if this might be some interesting legal ground to investigate. A witness wondered why the trooper was so adamant that because what he did was probably legal, it was therefore right, and why he didn’t just measure the window he had access to, which would’ve made the entire case moot.

And the trooper seemed to wonder why anyone was questioning what he did, as opposed to whether there was a better way to do it.