A life of crime is not for us

We've been waiting all summer for construction to finish at the end of our street and new sidewalks to be put in. Wouldn't it be great we thought to put our girl's name in cement for her to see every day when she was old enough to go to school? So today turned out to be the day. Only they paved it first thing in the morning as we saw with dismay on our way to work. What do we do? Pull the car over and brazenly vandalize public property within eyesight of the guy who just paved it who is working only 50 feet away? Or do we slink off and hope it doesn't dry completely before we can get back to do it?

”What are we, mice?,” we ridiculed ourselves. ”Why, so-and-so would do it. They wouldn't hesitate,” we cajoled ourselves as we drove in a circle trying to get our nerve up. ”But so-and-so is a jerk.” Oh, yeah. Right.

So we decided to come back in an hour on the pretense of going out for coffee when we hoped the long arm of the construction worker would not be able to reach us before the deed was completed. On the way back we had a conversation about exactly how her name was spelled and agreed at length on a particular spelling (and what names we might have to choose that are close in spelling should our daughter turn out to be a son.) Rob hopped out armed with my letter opener. I wanted to see it immortalized so I hopped out a minute later. Rob was already done. (I noticed there was a smear, an erasing if you will, next to the name he had printed. Turns out you shouldn't drive the implement too deep into went cement. It comes off in chunks and makes writing illegible.) So we turned to leave satisfied the job was finally done, when I suddenly realized he had not spelled the name as agreed. Crap! Another smear and the proper spelling was applied. I like to think our fretful disaster at vandalism says more about our character than our abilities.