A friend came over for a visit the other day. Before dinner, we took a few bicycles for a ride around the lake.

We were riding beach cruiser style bicycles. They aren’t the fastest bikes, but they are designed for comfort.

While we were riding, it came up in conversation that my friend was in the market for a new bicycle.

I told him today was his lucky day.

“I’ve got a more exciting bicycle back home. It’s probably ten times faster than these bikes, an eighteen speed, and probably ten times more expensive. I’ll show it to you and if you like it, you can just have it. It’s really nice, and I can’t ride it anymore, so it’s just sitting there. I’d be humbled to give it to you.”

He said, “Wow! Thank you! Why can’t you ride it anymore?”

I said, “Well, I could, but then Sue can’t keep up with me, and I like her to go with me, we like doing things together. So I got this beach cruiser to slow my ass down.”

He laughed and said he looked forward to seeing it.

When we got home, I took him out to the garage where there are about eight or nine bicycles.

“Wow!” he said. “Why do you have so many bikes? It’s just you and Sue, right?”

I said, “Well, sometimes visitors come over and like to ride around the lake, so we keep some extra bikes around.”

Then I pointed to it.

“Ah, there’s the one I was talking about.”

“The one that says ‘POLICE’ on the frame?” he asked.

I said, “Oh yeah. It’s a police bike. Or was a police bike at one time. It’s just mine now, and it’s very fast. See, I wrote ‘NOT THE’ in front of the word ‘POLICE’ to help alleviate any confusion.”

I’m not certain about all the legalities of riding around on a bicycle marked “POLICE,” but you can clearly see that it says NOT THE POLICE, so I suspect that would satisfy any judge that I’m not going around impersonating an officer.

Also, in case a gang banger sees me riding around on it, I don’t want them getting the wrong idea either.

They’ll point their guns at me and I’ll say, “It’s cool, man! I’m not the police. See? You can read, right?

Pfft.

People know how to read. They just don’t sometimes.”

“Welp,” I finally said, “let me help you get it into your truck.”

He raised an eyebrow and asked, “Hey wait a minute, Larry… where did you get this bike?”

“At a garage sale.”

“At a garage sale? You bought a police bicycle at a garage sale?”

I said, “Yeah, I know, right? Crazy. And this isn’t some cheap bike. These things were about four thousand dollars. I thought these were supposed to be in some sort of police department’s inventory system, so I asked him about it.”

“What did he say?” he asked.

I thought about it for a moment and said,

“I guess, now that I think about it, he didn’t. That’s weird. Oh well, I’m sure it’s cool, he seemed like a nice enough fellow. Anyway, he took two hundred dollars for it.”

“So then I wrote ‘NOT THE’ on it.”

“In paint?” my friend asked, running his fingers over the letters.

I said,

“That’s actually white-out.”

He ended up not taking the bike and said he would just pick one up at the store instead.

I said, “Ok. Well, it’s always here if you change your mind.”