Less Than Ten

I was doing laundry at my mother-in-law’s house and taking advantage of her subscription to Apple + TV by watching The Problem with Jon Stewart and he was interviewing Senator Tim Scott, from South Carolina. The show was about racism and America’s failure to really wrestle with its problematic history and make amends. Of course, one show was not going to solve it, and one discussion between a liberal comedian and a conservative senator, while interesting, was not going to move the needle much. But Senator Scott said something that stuck with me. He said in his lifetime that he’d been pulled over by cops more than twenty times.

I wondered, when I woke up at five this morning, how many times I’ve been pulled over in my lifetime? And what are the variables that would add or subtract to that number.

The first variable I eliminated was our age discrepancy. Senator Scott is about three weeks older than I am. We were both born in the late summer/early fall of 1965.

Like me, Senator Scott moved every few years. He moved around South Carolina while I moved around the west (Texas, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico). Like me, Senator Scott didn’t excel at high school but went on to graduate from college (Charleston Southern University). While I veered away from my father’s faith upon entering college (Red Rocks Community College & the University of Colorado), Charleston Southern…