That Awkward Age

Beep beep. Beep beep. My horn goes beep beep beep.

A person with a very sensitive startle reflex and a bad memory does not need a car with a broken alarm. 

At least twice a day, I am reminded of that when I insert my key into the lock and the horn starts blasting and the lights flashing as though the car were some wild jungle animal roused from sleep. It continues honking and blinking until I can get the key into the ignition and turn the motor, which allows just enough time for the neighbors to peak out their curtains or everyone at the gym parking lot to gawk my way to see who is stealing the cool car.

Right. As if someone would go to all that trouble to rip off a nine-year-old PT Cruiser with faded paint, numerous dings from last year’s four rear-enders and a license plate with flowers on it.

The thing is, it scares the crap out of me every time it happens. From one time to the next, I forget that it’s screwed up. So I bop out to the car, stick the car in the lock, and HONK! HONK! HONK!

I almost wet my pants every time. Then I get mad at myself for forgetting. I also can’t remember it long enough to remember to call the dealer to make an appointment to get the dang thing fixed.

The one time over the weekend when I remembered to tell my husband Bob and ask him if there wasn’t a switch somewhere that could be disconnected, his great suggestion for dealing with it was to open the passenger door with the key, then walk around. But if I could remember to do that, I wouldn’t need to remember to do that! I would call to get the thing fixed!

So tomorrow, I’ve GOT to remember to call to get the car alarm fixed. Oh, and I’ve also GOT to call the vet to get the dog’s prednisone refilled, or all of his hair will fall out again. Then I’ll have to take him to the vet, and he’s even terrified of the car when it ISN’T honking.

There we’ll be, both wetting ourselves in the driveway. That’ll really give the neighbors something to gawk at.
 

Photo: Boa-shaped horns mounted on the fenders of Model 45 HP Salon Cabriolet, custom-built for Maharajah of Rewa of India. Now in Blackhawk Museum in Danville, CA http://www.flickr.com/photos/uzvards/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Behold! The South shall slide again!

Pardon me for saying so, but Southerners do most things better than Yankees. We can skin a raccoon, fry up a mess of collard greens and – for sure – we write Southern literature much better than folks north of the Mason-Dixon.

But there’s one thing we can’t do worth a dern. That’s snow.

We can’t clean it up because we don’t have enough scrapers. We can’t dress for it because they don’t sell enough down-filled parkas and wool long-handles here. We can’t walk in it because we only own decorative boots. We can’t let our kids go to school in it because their brains apparently don’t work well in it. We don’t have the right toys to play in it, so we use trash bags and other such junk. And we can’t drive in it.

Oh, we think we can. We get out in our cars and just speed around like it’s a day at a pig pickin’, and before you can say Dale Earnhardt Jr. and the Daytona 500, we’re in a ditch and we’ve taken a whole slew of other cars with us.

That’s what happened today at the Fort Eustis exit at the most northern edge of the 20-mile-long city where I live, Newport News, Virginia. One somebody driving too fast for dry conditions -- much less in snow falling like dandruff from God’s beard -- tapped on the brakes, startling the person behind, who was following too close even if the road hadn’t been covered with ice thick enough to skate on.

(That, too, is Southern. We believe that if you ride somebody’s bumper real tight-like, you’ll get there a mite quicker, you know, unless you get shot for it, and then it don’t matter much.)

Well, before you know it, 70 cars littered the road and shoulders like cow pies steaming in Farmer Brown’s field. It made quite a mess and kept the Smokies busy for quite a spell trying to sort it all out.

And as a reward for all of our spiffy driving, we got on the national news! Woo-hoo! But they got the town wrong, saying the pile-up happened in Williamsburg, which is the only place folks up north seem to know about in this neck of the woods.

That’s alright. We’ll take their money any way we can get it. Spends fine down here, too. We’ll need it to fix up all of our cars.

(please don’t . . .) "KICK ME!!!" (. . . any more)

If you saw me in my driveway Sunday evening around 8:30 on my hands and knees facing east, I was not praying to Mecca. I was kissing the ground. Really.

I felt like I’d been in a road rally rather than on a day trip from Newport News to Fredericksburg, VA, for a professional meeting and back. Getting there was quick. Painless. No sweat.

After my meeting ended around 4, I was heading out of town toward I-95, stopped at a light, when I was rear-ended at a major intersection. Not too much damage to the car – just a gash on the rubber bumper, but a pretty good snap of the neck. (Chiropractor to follow.)

But this was the second time in 10 days I was rear-ended at a stop light – the previous time being in Newport News as I was heading to a meeting in Virginia Beach. No damage to the bumper, and not a scratch on the car.

But that was preceded in February by the accident on I-264 in Virginia Beach in which I may have had the teensiest bit of responsibility, and which resulted in me getting charged – and later exonerated – of improper lane change. Little damage to the car – just a nick on the back wheel cover – but could have been killed in the 180-degree spin.

What’s up with this – three accidents in four months? Am I wearing a “kick me” sign on my back or something?

Not to get too hinky … I get premonitions. And I had a premonition last fall that I was going to have a car accident. I did NOT get a premonition that I was going to have THREE accidents. So … are these three IT? Or are they the wind up for THE BIG ONE?

After the police came and we exchanged info, I decided to go to the closest Burger King to unrattle my nerves before getting on I-95.

I turned the car off. Did some deep breathing and collected myself. Went in and got a small “Milk Shake Sundae” (they actually give you a big straw called a “pipe” with a wrapper on the outside suggesting you go to a Web site and vote for whether it’s a milk shake or a sundae, as if you have nothing more important to do).

I don’t usually indulge myself in that kind of treat, but then remembered that calories don’t count after accidents. Plus, I washed it down with a large Diet Coke, which flushed out any erstwhile fat that might otherwise have accidentally stuck to my thighs.

All ice-cream-and-caffeined up, I headed back to the car for the trip home, dug for my keys and couldn’t find them. So I emptied the purse on the hood, grabbing for my lipstick as it rolled under the car. No keys.

Then, a sinking feeling. I walked around the car and saw my keys sitting in the console between the seats. I jerked on the car doors like a crazy woman – fussing under my breath – just as the family in the car parked beside me were loading up the kids and giving each other the “look.” As in, “Let’s get the babies out of here – this one is a few French fries short of a Happy Meal.”

I went back inside Burger King to get the address before calling AAA. Fortunately, AAA didn’t hold it against me that I didn’t have the current sticker on my card, and 45 minutes later a guy in a wrecker showed up, a drunk and/or sleeping woman in the front seat with him, and unlocked my car with a little wire thingy.

When he left, he handed me a 5”x8” card with a huge yellow smiley face on it. I thought the guy was mocking me, but it turns out there was a survey on the other side.

By 6:30, I was on I-95. Finally. But wait! There’s more! Within 60 seconds, both a tractor-trailer and an SUV – independently– cut me off in my lane, requiring me to slam on the brakes. Twice.

It was all enough to make me want to go buy a big honking land yacht. An old Buick or Olds. And rolling it in multiple layers of bubble wrap.

The next time you see me, I’ll be the little old lady with blue hair driving 15 mph in the right-hand lane.

Sorry if that holds you up.

Photo

Home, Home on the Free-Range Highway of Testosterone-Poisoned Driving

(Part one of a two-part series)

If sitting through back-to-back days of driving school and traffic court don’t make you a fan of hormone-free driving, nothing will.

In a stuffy Hampton Inn conference room, 17 offenders sat around a table Wednesday laden with enough dough-nuts, hard candy and coffee to put us all into a diabetic coma, watching 10-year-old AAA and DMV videos first used to torture prisoners at Guantanamo.

I was there voluntarily before I went to traffic court on Thursday, charged in February with improper lane change and causing an accident in nearby Virginia Beach.  I’ve always been pretty good at sucking up when pain is clearly unavoidable.

To have looked at the group, you might have thought we’d been picked as part of a focus group to represent local demographics. Genders were about even, white folks and African-Americans were about even (plus one Hispanic and two Asians), several were military, a couple were college students, and ages spread from 18 to 80+.  As a whole they looked like –- and seemed to be –- perfectly nice people, though there was one guy I wouldn’t ride up an empty elevator with.

But then the instructor started reviewing facts we needed to know to pass the exam at the end of the day, startling enough as raw statistics:

• One out of seven drivers on a weekend night is legally drunk;

• You are 25 times more likely to die in a crash without a seatbelt;

• 44,000 people (!) die every year in car accidents, including 1,000 in Virginia, and 700 of them weren’t wearing seat belts;

• 40 percent of all new drivers are involved in a wreck or get a ticket in the first year of driving.

I can’t say that’s a surprise –- having lived through three boys learning to drive and get their licenses. But to emphasize the point, Johnnie, the instructor, asked every kid under 20 in the class how fast they had driven. I let out an audible gasp as they –- to a person –- said they had driven anywhere from 90 to 120 mph at one time or another.

Even the cute little blond said she had driven her car “as fast as it would go.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!” I exclaimed.

“Well, just once,” she said, “When I was 16.” As though that explained everything.

Then, the biggest shocker of the day. One in three drivers on the road is packing heat!

“No way!” I said, remembering the time I almost came to blows with a guy over a parking spot at the mall during the holidays. It gave a whole new meaning to the idea of a big blow-out at Target.

As if on cue, Johnnie asked for a show of hands to prove it. Five raised theirs, two of whom were women, including the sweet-faced college girl who said her dad gave it to her when she left home to carry “for protection” and the tough-talking 50-year-old Philadelphia native, “Miss Lillian,” who was incensed that Virginia officers actually take the time to show up in court when they give you a speeding ticket. (“Humph. They’ve got better things to do in Philadelphia than go to traffic court.”)

I sat there with my mouth open as the good ole boy sitting beside me –- who hadn’t raised his hand –- leaned over and said under his breath, “You kinda naïve, ain’t ya?”

Well, yeah, I guess so. I’m rather attached to my illusions of safety and rationality. Bubba later nodded when I asked if he carried a gun, making the class statistic even higher than average.

We got our certificates at 4:30 and filed out at the end of the day.

“Ya’ll be careful with those guns, now, OK?” I admonished, getting the same kind of eye rolls I always got from my kids when I told them to wear their heavy coats instead of their hoodies when it was 20-degrees.

I backed out slowly from my parking spot, giving them all wide a berth. At least it wasn’t a weekend night.