Published: June 02, 2009 12:40 am      

CATHIE SHAFFER: Mom always gets the blame 6/2/09

My son got a ticket last Saturday and it’s all my fault.

Really.

Actually, it’s a “courtesy warning” that says if he doesn’t pay up, he’ll be cited to court.

I suppose that ought to be “we,” since I’m the one who enticed him to break the law. And, yes, as a good mother, I’ve already taken care of the fine — all three dollars of it.

Here’s how it all went down:

I had a couple of days to take off work, and I thought it would be a great idea to wrap them around a weekend so I could participate in the U.S. 23 yard sale last Friday and Saturday. Since I’m not big on sitting in the sun by myself, I encouraged my son to join me.

Sell your Star Wars stuff, I said. Clean out your closets. Don’t make me suffer alone if shoppers walk past my display laughing.

We had planned to only set up and sell on Friday. The day was good, and we made enough money to go back out on Saturday with refreshed stock — although you’d never notice looking around my house that I’d gotten rid of a single thing.

The second day, we decided to set up with a bunch of other people on a former used car lot at the edge of a Greenup County city that begins with F. I had to leave for about an hour, but I knew my son could handle things.

I came back with big news for him — the muffler on my car had fallen down and was scraping the road as I drove. I needed him to get it off.

He had big news for me, too. A city police officer had stopped by and told him he was violating the law. Turns out the city has a yard sale permit ordinance I knew nothing about, hence the need to go to city hall on Monday and make things right.

Luckily, taking the muffler off proved easy since it’s attached to the rest of the exhaust system by brackets. And the ticket — excuse me, courtesy warning — gave us a chance to use our imaginations.

What would happen if we didn’t pay? Jail time? Orders never to darken the doorways of that particular city again? Community service patrolling the park so stray cats didn’t get into the sand box?

And what would we have to give up to pay the fine? After all, we were out there selling to raise money for our own particular causes — in my case, for example, a new muffler.

After a little contemplation, I decided I could probably part with the whole three bucks myself without too much pain.

Three dollars is half a fast-food combo. Three dollars is a large ice cream cone at my favorite ice cream place. Three dollars is a fourth of a haircut at my regular salon, coffee and a doughnut at the place kitty-corner from me, just under half of what I paid for the last paperback novel I bought at a discount store.

We’d pretty much forgotten about the ticket — I know, courtesy warning — by the end of the day when our noses were sunburned and our spirits flagging. Elated by how much we’d made, I was in a great mood driving home.

And still contemplative. Because it occurred to me as I passed the turn-off for Raceland that the $3 ticket was one percent of what we’d made that day, the same as that city’s new payroll tax.

And well worth it to me to fatten my formerly lean pocketbook.

CATHIE SHAFFER can be reached at cshaffer@zoominternet.net or (606) 473-9851.