Saturday night we were on the highway coming home from Chipotle, our current favorite guilty pleasure that we will drive miles and miles for and base activities around their locations. Lily was looking out the window at all the cars and became very curious about license plates.
"What are they? Where do they come from? Who makes them?"
I remember asking that same question when I was a kid and I was told that inmates in prison make license plates. Even today I am not sure if that is entirely true and I know the answer is only a google click away but I am too tired for that now and I think I like believing the story that I was told. Maybe I even like not really knowing for sure, but for goodness sakes now that I have talked it to death I am going to have to google it.
An entire conversation unfolded about who makes the license plates and where do they come from and why, why and why?
Lily asked, "What are inmates?"
"What is prison and why do people get put in there?"
"Did they do something really bad?"
"Sort of bad?"
"If I went to prison could I make license plates too?"
So Sunday morning I was reading the paper and came across a few stories that were really sad, although every story in the paper is sad. I almost never ever read a story in the paper with a happy ending. I suppose it is because happy endings and good news are not exactly newsworthy.
So sometimes I don't even bother reading the paper or even watching the news despite there being a television on my desk at work all day. Someone like this might miss a story about a boy thought to be flying around in a balloon. Might miss this story but hear about some sort of balloon boy on twitter, and twitter being a news source is pretty scary.
One of the stories I read was about a Mom who lost her home and lives in a homeless shelter. She travels ninety minutes each way to take her kids to school. People were donating money and other items and I thought it would be nice if we did as well.
I suggested to the girls that sending a letter and letting this woman know how much they would appreciate having a Mom that would travel ninety minutes for them and what a gift she is giving her children. Teaching them to value their education.
We moved on to another article about a Mother who lost her eighteen year old son because he was beaten to death in jail for not participating in a sort of fight club that was organized by the correction officers.
The girls asked me what he had done that was so bad that he died and I said he didn't want to do something that other people wanted him to do, so they beat him up. We were in the moment taking the whole story in and feeling the sense of loss that Mother must have felt, when Lily says in her most serious tone, "maybe he didn't want to make license plates anymore."
At this point, we all tried to keep our sad, contemplative faces on but we couldn't because what she said was just too cute.
