A cop's kid watches her back

Any kid who has ever watched a Saturday morning Western knows that the hero always sits in a corner of the room, never with his back to the door. I guess I have my own version.
Over a recent weekend, my husband and I drove to Rochester, N.Y., to visit Aunt Mary Ann. On the way back, we stopped at a sandwich shop for lunch. After getting our food, we sat at a table placed against the windows directly next to the exit door.
As I sat down (with my back to the door, incidentally), I reached across the table and put my purse on the chair next to my husband. "I don't want my purse on this chair near me. Someone might grab it and run out the door," I said matter-of-factly.
He looked at me oddly. There were two college kids, an elderly couple and a businesswoman sitting in the restaurant. Nobody looked like a purse snatcher, and certainly, no one was wearing a black cowboy hat.
Nonetheless, I left my purse in its safe location, realizing that I may have "different standards."
"Well," I thought. "I come by it honestly. I'm a cop's daughter."
Advice over yearsstill has effect
My father was a policeman in Cleveland for 30 years. Stuff like that has an effect. All those little tidbits of advice still echo in my mind. Decades after his retirement, I still hear his voice when I go into a sandwich shop -- "Keep an eye on your purse," it says.
When I grocery shop, I never put my purse into the kiddy seat -- not unless I have a strong grip on the strap at the same time. "If you turn away to pick up a can of lima beans, someone might snatch your purse from the basket," Dad admonishes.
If I'm walking down the street, I grasp the purse itself with my hand. After all, someone could run up the street and slash the strap, making off with my fortune. And, heaven forbid I forget to zip the purse closed! "Any pickpocket could come along and reach into an open purse without you knowing it!" my father insists.
When I'm a passenger in a car, I keep my arms inside the windows. An elbow is OK, but extending the arm is strictly forbidden. As any self-respecting accident cop knows, many a limb has been knocked off by a bad right turn and a telephone pole. (I wonder how many accident scenes it would take to add THAT ditty to your repertoire.)
Long before anyone else had heard of the "rear-ending scam," in which a crook hits your rear bumper, then robs you when you get out to exchange insurer numbers, I knew about it. I was the only kid in high school worried about stopping at red lights in questionable neighborhoods.
Motorcycles are accidentsjust waiting to happen
I was a pre-teen when I decided motorcycles were not for me. A few accident scene photos -- my dad worked for some years in the hit-and-run unit -- convinced me that motorcycles were quite dangerous.
I don't know if he snuck the photos home just for the purpose of making an indelible impression on his two impressionable daughters or not, but I'm pretty sure he did. "Don't ever ride one of these," my father's voice still says. I've been on a motorcycle twice, and both times I wore a helmet.
Ironically, he never said, "Don't drink and drive," "Don't do drugs," "Don't rob banks" (he'd caught a couple of bank robbers, though), but I learned these rules elsewhere anyway.
He focused on the ones that might not be so obvious.
(Here's one that had nothing to do with being a cop, but it, too, echoes in my head whenever I use a pay telephone: "Don't ever stick your hand in the change return of a pay telephone without looking in there first. Some jerk may have spit tobacco in it to be funny." Thank heaven for cell phones.)
It wasn't until I was an adult that I ever thought my dad might have been in danger at times. It wasn't until I was an adult that he told me he was bored MUCH of the time, waiting for something to happen and a call to come in. But I DID know everything he thought would help me.
For example, "NEVER drive over a bag in the road. Sometimes those bags are filled with bottles or nails, put there by some scum bag hoping to ruin your tires."
Good advice to this day. That one's on me, the cop's daughter.
murphy@vindy.com