I'LL SHOW YOU MINE IF YOU SHOW ME YOURS

I don't know about your life but mine seems to run in themes. Odd random themes that just pop up with no rhyme or reason. Things like us all coming into work and realize that we have all worn some shade of green like we were in junior high and had planned this all out on our princess phones the night before. Or you will not have anyone on your case load pregnant and then, in a pre-stork explosion, you will end up with 4 girls expecting and 8 guys whose *fiances* are pregnant. Or you will schedule 15 people to see and only 3 will show up.

But today's theme has never happened to me in all of my 11 years of probation.

Today was show and tell. Show and tell with photos.

One of my older women comes in and we have a nice office visit but you can tell she is just not ready to leave. She picks up her purse and takes out an envelope filled with about 30 pics in it. They are pics of her holding the fish that she caught last weekend, her ex husband who is not so ex anymore and of her dogs. The problem is that these pics are all taken with a 1970's point and shoot Polaroid. I did not know you could even get the film for it anymore! You know the kind....you point the camera and the picture comes out of the bottom with that mechanical noise and they you flop it around so that the color develops? That's the one! All the photos look like they were taken in the 70's but she assures me that they were all taken last week. To make matters worse, there was not a complete image of anyone or anything in the photos. Everything is just slightly off kilter. I see half of the ex's face, my grinning girl holding half of a fish and several fuzzy dogs butts. I flip through the pics and make the appropriate "ooohhsss" and "aaahhhss" and "that is so cutes". She finishes up the slide show and puts her photos away with great care. Then she takes out her new drivers license for me to see. She is very upset because they made her take her glasses off and she thinks she does not look like herself. I agree with her. She looks more like the ex that she has shown me in previous pictures. Then, from behind her current drivers license, she pulls out a license from the past...grins and then turns it over to show me.

It is my girl with her head full of fluffy pink hair rollers all over her head IN HER DRIVERS LICENSE!! She said that she carried it for years and people always loved seeing it.

Me? My mind is racing a million miles an hour wondering how I can slip it into my copy machine to prove this to you so that you would not think I was making it up. I know that not one of you is going to believe that I actually held IN MY HANDS a drivers license where the woman is totally smiling with a head full of rollers! Finally I give up and give her the license back. She puts everything back in her purse and, satisfied, gets up and leaves.

My next guy comes in, and *sniff sniff* I notice that for this office visit he has added cologne. Well now! That is something that has never happened in our previous office visits. My thoughts are he is working on his hygiene. He is a long timer and really has nothing left to do but report so our office visits do not take much time. We chat, discuss how he is doing and then I give him his next appointment. He gets up to leave and then sits back down and says

"There is something that I would like to show you."

Picture if you will my mind quickly turning blank and my eyes blinking at a high rate of speed at the thought of a aftershaved sex offender offering to show me anything.

Before I can say *Put that thing away* he takes out two photos. They are from his work. He works in a field where they load and unload freight cars off of truck and rail road cars. He is the mechanic for the massive machines that do that work. He tells me that he took those pictures with his camera just for me so that I could what it is that he does.

There are a lot of lonely people out there.

Pray that none of the rest of my people that I see today have had a vasectomy or hemorrhoids.