I had a bad peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch today. The bread was kind of old, there wasn’t nearly enough jelly and the only peanut butter we currently have in the house is the gritty reduced-fat kind.
It could have been worse.
This afternoon, I came across the following headline from the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate: Peanut Butter and Jelly Blamed for One-Car Park Ridge Crash.
The story truly is fantastic. Here’s the first sentence: “A man was so engrossed in eating his peanut butter and jelly sandwich that he drove his car into a utility pole, Park Ridge (IL) police say.” Isn’t that great?
I love peanut butter. It’s the only food besides bacon that can make anything taste better. If I’m ordering a three-course meal, the first thing I’ll do is scan the menu for an entrée that contains bacon and a dessert that has peanut butter. But even I think it’s a stretch to blame driving into a telephone pole on a peanut butter sandwich.
Then, I got to the best sentence of both the article and my day: “The accident report noted that when an officer arrived on the scene, the driver’s face ‘was covered with peanut butter.’”
Okay. Even if the telephone pole’s right outside the police station, it’s going to take officers a minimum of 10 minutes to get there. So we’re to believe that the sandwich contained so much peanut butter that the guy couldn’t wipe it all off before police got there? That, in fact, large portions of his face were still “covered” in peanut butter???
Years of watching Adrian Monk, Shawn Spencer and Sherlock Holmes solve crime has taught me one thing: if a guilty party is trying to explain himself to you with a face full of peanut butter, that person is a liar.
So here’s the theory. The article says the driver was a 25-year-old man driving an E-350 van at 2 p.m. No 25-year-old owns an E-350 van for personal use unless he’s made some interesting life choices. So let’s assume that he’s driving a work van, and he’s on the clock.
Now, let’s imagine that our man decided to indulge in a couple of cold ones during his lunch break. Then maybe he hit a pothole, maybe he swerved to avoid a squirrel, but now he finds himself wrapped around a telephone pole in a work van with a blood-alcohol level that’s flirting with the legal limit. He could lose his license, his freedom and a job that lets him get away with swinging by the bar during lunch.
So in a moment of panicked inspiration, he grabs the jar of Jif he ALWAYS keeps in the glove box, swallows a handful of peanut butter, then wipes the rest on his face. It’s enough to cover the smell of alcohol and give him a reason for not paying attention to the road.
Good try, Arlington Heights man. You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool a TV detective.
LIFE LESSON #5
In cooking and in life, peanut butter covers a multitude of sins.
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