Desperation Sets In
By now, Dad was just itching to fish, so he tried a third time. This iteration, he included all the documentation he could scrounge, along with several photographs of him actually buying the boat. There was one of him wearing a COVID mask while looking at the boat at Bass Pro and another of a large smiling man helping him load it into the back of his pickup truck.
Perhaps the mask made him look sinister. This application was returned as well with an admonition that, before he could actually register his boat he would have to pay Mississippi sales tax on the original purchase from four years ago. Dad duly reported to the local tax collector’s office with a check for $56 — 7% of the boat’s original $800 purchase price. They looked at him like he had three heads, refused to accept his check, and sent him packing. At this point, Dad just gave up and resigned himself to his newfound life of crime.
He collated all the submissions, returned checks and rejection letters and put them in a big folder he now keeps in the glove box of his truck. He can’t keep anything else in his glove box anymore, because this stack of paper is now roughly the size of the U.S. Federal Tax Code. However, he figures if some boat cop gets sufficiently bored as to hassle a pair of octogenarians out jigging for crappie, he will just present his rucksack full of rejected boat-registering paper and throw himself on the mercy of the courts. My dad, the career criminal.
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