Day 43: Fey Fortitude

It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I ever even got a ticket.

OK, there was one parking violation at college, but I paid it off quickly and put it behind me. It was a youthful indiscretion. The parking spot was asking for it, sitting there all open like that. What did it expect?

The moving violation is for allegedly rolling through a three-way stop two blocks from my house. The cop is parked there to make his Friday afternoon quota. I am on auto-pilot, granted. Perhaps I do not come to the Full & Complete Stop mandated, with the requisite jerking back of the head. But it’s the neighborhood where I raised little kids. I’m aware of its safety issues on a neurotically deep maternal level.

My boys are in the car with me, with two of their friends. “Listen up, gentlemen,” I say, as the policeman approaches. “Here’s how you handle these situations.” Their eyes are big. They don’t snort and guffaw and heckle me until later.

All that, to say my life has generally been one of overt obedience.

Yet when I see vehicles seductively propping up their windshield wipers in snowstorms I am wickedly tempted to snap them off. Those brazen cars deserve what they get.

Back in the day, I was not subject to seductions such as this. Motor vehicles in winter knew their place and behaved appropriately. They did not flaunt naked windshield blades for all to see.

Grab ‘em good! Stop pussyfooting!

Or so my lizard brain tells me.

But I am not an iguana. I do not have to behave like a Gila monster. I crawled a little farther out of the muck than those creatures did.

Would that the lizard-brained creatures in Washington had done so as well.