Officer Penrod

Around 2010 or so I was first experimenting with marijuana. I'm from Palatine, and another northwest suburb was Hoffman Estates. New in my weed smoking career, I soon discovered that Hoffman was the fun place to go to smoke weed with friends. There were nice parks, forest type areas, and corner stores to buy things and engage in minor hood rat activities as teenagers.

One day we were hanging out by what we called Pat's Lake, it was behind Pat's Pantry, a corner store, on a bench near a creek. We were waiting for something, and for no reason a cop came up to us and started asking us about fire works and port o potties.

He said that some kids were spotted lighting off fireworks inside of a port o potty a few blocks away from us. This was something that friends of ours were doing, and it was definetly not us. This officer asked us to empty our pockets so we did, for the most part.

Some of us had weed in our pockets and our wallets that we kept inside of our pants. I was scared, as were my friends, it seemed like we were about to get busted for weed when we were not  even doing anything to attract this kind of attention.

This officer questioned us for awhile, and was a bit intimidating. He soon called his partner, and about five minutes later the partner showed up. He was a heavier guy, and I saw on his name tag "Officer Penrod".

Penrod was a nice guy, he  cleared up any confusion that the other officer had about it being us who lit off fireworks in the port o potty. He said we were cool and could put all of the stuff back in our pockets.

Both of them soon left, and we all blew sighs of relief and proceeded to do hood rat things in a different area. We met up with the kids who lit the fireworks in the port o potty, and told them that we got to meet Officer Penrod.

Penrod soon became an inside joke amongst us all, and I'm grateful for his kindness and his silly last name.