Mack and the White Powder Incident

Back during the Fall 2001 anthrax scare, my 86-year-0ld neighbor, Mack, and I took a trip to Princeton, NJ, with his wife's ashes to be spread over her family's plot. They had no children. We drove his wife's Cadillac up so he could give it to her sister, then rented a car for the return trip back to Jacksonville, FL, down the I95 corridor.

At 5:30 pm, about 2 hours after returning the rental car to the JAX Airport location, my home phone rang. "This is Sgt. Harris of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office." [I'm thinking this is another phone solicitor trying to get a donation and am ready to say I'm not interested and hang up.] "Is this ...?" Well, now that he has my full name, he's got my attention.

"I'm calling in regard to a rental car you returned to the airport today. They found a plastic bag containing white powder in it, and we wondered if you could enlighten us as to what the powder is?"

ENLIGHTEN??? I don't like the sound of that.....YIKES!!!! This could be BAD!!!!

After a few horrified moments, it dawned on me. "Oh my gosh! I had my 86-year-old neighbor with me and it's his Weight Gain! It's a diet supplement! It comes in a big canister, and he didn't want to carry the whole thing with us, so he poured a bunch of the powder into a gallon-sized Baggie! [I'm in a panic, talking fast, envisioning life in prison as the reward I get for doing a good deed.] He set it on the car seat for the trip, but then we decided we should hide it with all this anthrax stuff going on. We didn't want people to look in the window and think we had anthrax or cocaine. We must have left it under the floor mat in the back seat! In fact, I don't think he even used it. We forgot it was there!"

As I paused to take a breath, the sergeant said he'd been trying to reach me unsuccessfully by phone for some time, but the line had been busy. "We tried twice to do an emergency break-in, but you were apparently on the Internet." He informed me that a police car was currently en route to my house.

I imagined the officer bursting through the front door, gun drawn, skeptically listening to my pleading as he handcuffed me. What would my children think when they saw the headlines with my picture on the front page of the newspaper? Mom Arrested!!! ---they'd have to cook their own Thanksgiving dinner this year.

The sergeant told me to get the exact name and manufacturer of the white powder from Mack so that I could tell the officer when he arrived. [Maybe there was hope for me yet???] When the squad car arrived, I met the officer at the door with the information and offered to take him across the street to Mack's so he could see the exact source.

Fortunately, in addition to having a friend who also used Weight Gain, the officer had a sense of humor. "Last week," he told me, "a woman called to report she thought her son had Amtraks."

Whew! I would remain a free woman. And Mack would have a story that he'd never forget.