Rap Sheet: Grand Larceny, Pinky Swear Violations, and More...

We woke up Saturday morning to some rather alarming signage in the bathroom:

and the kitchen:



It seems Bronwen had made off with a wad of Simon's homemade Mead Street Bucks, and Irene had persuaded him to channel his ire into these ominous posters, rather than into a direct confrontation (verbal or physical) with the criminal -- an idea that struck us as pretty brilliant, frankly. Irene's own participation in the theft was quickly forgotten in a flurry of postering.

Bronwen, for her part, seemed a little uncomfortable when she first saw her guilty-looking face plastered all over the house under the heading "Wanted: Dead or Alive," but she refrained from defensive recitations of the four or five tit-for-tats that (we presume) prompted her crime spree. In fact, aside from confiding to her grandfather (a retired judge) that she didn't want to be tried for larceny ("I never met anyone who did," he assured her) she mostly took her sudden infamy in stride.

Which is probably why she was so furious a couple of hours later when she, Josie, and Irene were hard at work on a Wanted poster featuring Simon and Menna -- whose alleged crime involved reneging on a Pinky Swear to abide by the Mead Street Supreme Court's ruling in a case meant to specify the authority (and clarify the identity) of the Republic's various law enforcement officers -- and Simon, protesting at the top of his lungs, pulled the plug on the computer in order to prevent them from printing said poster, causing the whole graphic file to be irrevocably lost.

"I said we'd abide by their decision unless it was horrible," he spat out, when asked about this later. And it was, in his eyes: Justices Josie and Irene had declared all officers of the law to be equals, thus stripping the Sheriff (Simon) of any special authority over his Deputies (among them... Bronwen). But activist judges aside, it did seem odd to get that upset about someone putting your face on an obviously silly Wanted poster when you had gleefully done exactly the same thing to her that very morning.

In any case, we do our best to keep Mead Street operating under rule of law -- the nursery school law, "Use Your Words," if nothing else -- and deliberately and forcibly destroying someone else's creation is clearly beyond the pale. Simon, for his part, pointed out that a) Bronwen (and Irene, it re-emerged) had destroyed several of his Mead Street Buckeroos that morning and b) that his escalating verbal requests for the girls to stop had been greeted with scorn -- a surefire and unfortunately well-traveled road to rage (and property damage).

So we spent the rest of the afternoon processing the whole plug-pulling incident in a grueling, tearful session that eventually -- after more than an hour of forced admissions, recalcitrant "apologies" resentfully "accepted," an archaeological catalog of old transgressions, the pointing out of dysfunctional patterns and contributing dynamics by semi-impartial observers, a few genuine emotional break-throughs, and a stamina-testing tendency for all parties to repeatedly recycle issues we thought had been resolved ten minutes ago -- led to some substantive, if tentative, agreements about how to handle future conflicts.

Then Irene's father came to pick her up. We explained a little bit about the afternoon's dramatics, and showed him the Mead Street Buckeroos at the heart of the original dispute. Harvey, as luck would have it, once worked for the U. S. Department of the Treasury. Which is how we learned that Simon's imitation currency is, in fact, in violation of federal law. Whoops!

It had occurred to us to wonder about this when Simon first fired up the scanner the day before. Having once spent an afternoon struggling with a color copier that somehow mistook the Hirabayashis' wedding photo for a one dollar bill and kept printing thick black stripes across the bride's face just in case it was George Washington's, we were a little surprised that our scanner replicated the Mead Street Bucks without a hitch. But we had assumed that as long as Simon made no attempt to pass it off as legal tender, his funny money would be considered harmless. Besides, the bills were ink-jetted, one-sided, and clearly featured a series of pink-toned Mead Streeters in place of the greenish dead guys -- who could imagine they were intended to look real? Irrelevant, our expert informed us.

Seeing Simon's eyes widen, Harvey assured him, "You're probably okay with these, if only because there isn't a treasury agent on earth who is going to want to go to court with this" -- here he brandished a ten dollar bill with Menna's solemn, adorable visage plastered in the middle of it -- "as Exhibit A." He said the simplest solution would be to shrink the bills -- if they're less than 2/3 scale (or something like that) they're legal. "Make Monopoly money!" he advised. "It fits in your pockets better anyway."

Moral #1: Just because the thing you're making is totally goofy doesn't mean it's not going to drive someone to apoplectic rage.

Moral #2: Or that someone couldn't make a federal case out of it.