You know you're getting old when . . .

You know you are getting old when you are pulled over by a sheriff and told you are driving too slow. Yup. We were out on a beautiful Saturday afternoon and I came to a four way stop at an intersection. I had made a wrong turn so I didn't really know which way I wanted to go. I made a left and the sheriff pulled in behind me. The road turned into the on-ramp for Highway 2, a two-lane state highway. All of a sudden, the sheriff had his lights on. When he came to the window, he asked me if I knew why he had pulled me over. I had to admit, I had no idea. He then told me that I was creating a hazard because I had not accelerated fast enough onto the highway, and to make things worse, I had changed lanes (to the slow lane.) It was only after he asked me the next question that I understood that his stop had been a pretext. He asked: Have you been smoking marijuana today? I was thinking, do you know I work at a prosecutor's office and my fiancee is an attorney and we were out birdwatching and having a picnic! He said he smelled a "faint wiff" of marijuana. Really? In your imagination? Because I have a beard and S was wearing a bandanna, we were profiled as stoners.

While I understand what wend through his mind: they are driving slow and look like a couple who might smoke pot, as a prosecutor, it pisses me off when cops do things they are not supposed to do. What if I did have a trunk full of weed? A good attorney could have shown that his stop was pre-textual. Since when is it illegal to drive carefully?

We were just waiting for him to pull us out of the car and ask to search the vehicle. He stopped just short of crossing the line and let us go on our way. I guess he was hoping we would just confess, which a lot of people do. The people who could best take advantage of the fifth amendment really don't understand it. Just watch an episode of COPS and you can see that.

So, because I was able to keep my mouth shut and not make any smart-mouthed comment to the officer (which is a way you can get an officer looking for something, anything to cit you with) we were let off, but S has not stopped giving me a hard time for driving like an old man.