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I recently shifted a routine morning appointment to a bit later. Instead of landing myself in the tail end of rush hour traffic for this twice-weekly meeting, I am on the road after the rush has gone. I had thought that this would make for an easier drive. Some days that is the case. Most days, though, it is simply a more interesting drive. Instead of joining the masses making their familiar trek; a consistent trudge, I join those running a smattering of errands, racing off in a million different directions. Paths cross, merge and diverge in random fashion. Drivers have differing destinations and, apparently, vastly different expectations of how long the trip should take.
In one single day, I had several of those interesting “crossing, merging and diverging” encounters. Leaving my neighborhood while making good speed down one thoroughfare a car rolled through a stop sign and turned right in front of me. I wasn’t happy, but I couldn’t say I had never done that before myself. Already on the brakes, I was still unprepared for the offending car to step on their own brakes and turn on their left turn signal; coming to a dead stop in front of me…after cutting it pretty close merging in front of me in the first place.
Just a few miles down the road another car pulled out in front of me. I know the law says that drivers are allowed to turn right on red in this state. I know it also says that one may do so only after stopping…and, presumably, ensuring that there is room to do so without impeding crossing traffic. In this case the did not stop, but I nearly had to in order to avoid a collision.
On my return trip that same day, I watched as the car in the right lane slid over in front of me to make room for merging traffic from the on ramp, only to have the second-in-line car on the on ramp proceedto pass the car ahead of them at the top of the ramp; pulling not into the right hand lane but the middle of three lanes. Not 30 yards ahead of me, I watched as 4 cars shared the same length of 3 lane highway.
Yikes!
You know I like to grumble, but I’m writing here not just because I wish to complain. Nor am I pointing out driving errors in others because I am such a good driver myself. The truth is quite the opposite. I’m not that great a driver. One of these days I fear I will fall victim to the insanity on the roads. Worse yet, it seems likely that I will not be the only victim.
In these three near-accidents, the drivers playing fast and loose with the rules of the road drove a truck, an SUV and a sedan; one was on a cell phone, two were not. One incident occurred on a busy suburban street, another on a country road and the last, obviously was on the expressway.
The common thread among them?
All three were young women, and all of them had children in the vehicle.
I don’t want to be involved in any accident. I certainly don’t want anything do with a multi-car wreck. Moreover, if an accident was inevitable, the last car on earth I would want to hit is the one carrying a mother and her children.
I almost did it, though; three times on one round-trip.
I find myself now, offering a prayer to the universe to protect those blinded to the dangers around them by carpool rules or new schedules or unruly passengers, or whatever else has captured their attention or put them running late.
I hope that you, too, may find a minute or two to offer up your own prayer for the frazzled.
While searching for a video or description of the drunk surrounded by a lamppost that I mentioned in my previous post, I failed to find the story for which I was searching. Instead, I found several references to a joke about a drunk looking for his keys.
In essence the joke goes like this.
A drunk loses the keys to his house and is looking for them under a lamppost. A policeman comes over and asks what he’s doing.
“I’m looking for my keys” he says. “I lost them over there”.
The policeman looks puzzled. “Then why are you looking for them all the way over here?”
“Because the light is so much better”.
I am struck that, while comically illustrated above, I actually do spend a lot of time looking under that lamppost; in both my personal and professional lives. I look for identity in how others see me sometimes. I look for comfort in what I have, not what I need. I look for answers in the data I have, not necessarily the data that would really clarify the solution.
How about you?
A friend recently sent me the photo to the left.
Since blonde is only my chosen but not natural hair color at the moment, I did not take offense.
Even in the days when blonde really was my natural hair color, I would have found it funny… in an absurd kind of way… Just the way it was intended.
I was reminded of an old comedy bit. I no longer can remember who performed the vaudeville-like routine; probably a Dick Van Dyke or a Donald O’Connor
(yup – I know I am dating myself a bit)
In the routine, a drunk runs into a lamppost, stumbles around for a bit and walks into it again, and again, and again. In the end, defeated, having walked into a lamppost from every direction, he declares himself surrounded…by a single lamppost.
I was listening to the radio yesterday, though, and heard the report that a family had gotten lost in a corn maze. Looking at photos online, I did confirm that the maze was significantly more complex than the one in the picture. It truly was a maze in which one might find oneself lost, but is that really newsworthy?
Well, yes. It became news when the family called 911.
Seriously.
I get that they had children with them. I get that the sun was setting, and the operators had shut down the maze for the night (they had not yet left them premises). I get that frustration had probably gotten the better of them.
I must ask, though, how, exactly, did it become local law enforcement’s job to teach them to walk through the corn to the road and back to their car? It was a wall of corn, not 12 inches of armor-plate.
In a broader sense, I have to ask, how, in general, we have determined that if we get into something and can’t get out, that it is someone else’s job to fix our mess? How do start something without a back-up plan? How do we go straight to municipal emergency services?
Why not call a family member or friend to come honk their horn in the parking lot? Heaven help us if we actually should owe a favor back in return. Better to just use taxpayer money.
Why not call the maze operators? Surely they have a vested interest in the plight of the lost. Oops, I forgot; 411 is a toll call. No reason to invest the $1.50 of our own money.
While I have given up worrying that our GPS, MapQuest generation no longer could find north if their lives depended on it, it does seem that even the most citified, device-dependent among us, ought to be able to follow a street light.
It seems I am wrong.
Instead it seems that, even without consumption of mind-altering substances, we are becoming as impaired as the drunk surrounded by a single lamppost; the blonde stuck in a simple maze.
So…even though the topic for today is mazes, I think that, rather than “How do we get out?”, the more important question is “How did we get here?”
I have a healthy fear of my potential for an unhealthy brain. For all the improvements modern medicine has made in the last century, though, there is not much to be done on my part to allay my fears. In the case of the Alzheimer’s disease I stand to inherit from my mother, I think breakthroughs are on the horizon. For now, though, even the best advice the medical community can give leaves me a little discouraged.
I am told to maintain good cardio-vascular health. Yup. Fine. And what good will that do me?
It will prevent the forms of dementia resulting from an oxygen starved brain.
Will it do anything for the kind of dementia to which I am genetically pre-disposed?
Nope.
I get advice to eat healthfully, get plenty of sleep, and limit stress, alcohol intake and blows to the head. I don’t want to dismiss what is obviously a set of reasonable guidelines for better overall health, but, truth be told, I was looking a little more of an edge.
As a last resort, it seems, there is a well-meaning segment who suggests that I do the crossword puzzle to stave off Alzheimer’s disease. If asked, I will say those folks are full of baloney. In my mind, this is the medical equivalent of treating bullet wound to the belly with a shot of whiskey and a dirty rag. The whiskey might dull the pain and the rag will keep the blood off of the settee, but, for all your efforts, you’ve done nothing to fix the problem.
The crossword advice, like the whiskey and rags, just masks the symptoms. It doesn’t untangle the plaques.
Throwing caution to the wind, I have embarked on a different path. Deciding not to mask my symptoms with crossword puzzle wizardry, I have decided to take a different approach. This morning I tried my hand at the KenKen puzzles that the paper offers. At first glance, one might think this is right up my alley; number games…math…logic…
Ahh, but that is where you would be wrong.
Instead of gently stimulating your brain and subtly rebuilding alternate neuro-pathways around less effective synapses like crossword puzzling might do, KenKen highlights the severity of your memory loss, punishes you for every minor lapse in concentration, and leaves you reeling from the startling horror of hearing your internal monologue stutter through the list of number combinations to get two numbers between 1 and 6 to add up to 11.
After just a few minutes of “well these two blocks are either a 1 and 4, or a 2 and a 5, unless, of course, it’s a 4 and a 1, or a 5 and a 2, which works if these other three blocks are mostly odd, but only if there is a 6 in the corner, which means that the bottom right is a 1, 3, or 5, but then I can’t use the 5 or the 1 for the first two blocks” I found myself praying that the plaques in my brain were already forming. That way, I supposed, there would be something, at least, holding my grey matter together.
There is the old phrase “those who can, do”. For my first efforts, though, I have to say I KenKen not…
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