Road Rage Revisited

This was originally posted a couple of years ago but I decided to re-post a few older things every now and then for the new people. It's all about getting up to speed, you know...

Road Rage


I have written before about the endless questions from small children and since it continues to amuse me, I’ll be covering that subject yet again.

Today as I was driving down the highway, Katie who is four, had questions. As usual, a lot of questions. As I was passing a car on the two-lane highway, she asked, “Why are we going so fast?” That seemed like a reasonable question, easy enough to answer and be done with. So hoping to satisfy her curiosity, I explained to her that we needed to go fast to go around another car that was going too slow. Then she asked, “Why you didn’t say ‘Move idiot’? Why you didn’t?”

In retrospect, I guess it is a fair bet that she has heard me say that a few times. It could be worse. Normally I am not a terribly impatient driver but it absolutely drives me nuts when someone pulls out in front of me and then drives so slowly that you just know that they must be headed to the senior center. So, that is where the “move idiot” and even the occasional “dickhead” come out.

Ironically, last week my teenage son accused me of driving too slowly. Just to clarify, this is completely false and I speed on a regular basis. I have been known to tell my small children, “Help Mommy look out for cops”. Then I realized how bad that sounded. So to make things worse, after my son accused me of driving like an old person, he then said that C. drives fast. HE HAD IT COMPLETELY REVERSED! We are talking about a man that can’t do anything within a reasonable period of time, including driving from point A to point B. I am fairly confident that any drivers with the misfortune to follow him would not be at all surprised to see him park the car and remove a walker from the trunk. He can’t even just get in or out of the car without stopping to do something completely unrelated, for example, getting a Kleenex and wiping some bird poop off the car door. Of course, then it is possible that his next thought is about birds and his next stop just might be the garage to get the bird food and then proceed to replenish the feeders. Then he might finally get in the goddamn car. Deep breaths everyone.

A few days ago, I was trapped in the car with the above mentioned slowpoke, on the interstate, and decided to amuse myself a bit. I told him that my son said that I drive too slowly and HE drives fast. I half expected a rant from him about why I do drive too fast in his opinion, blah, blah, blah. Instead the conversation went in a direction that I really had not anticipated. He didn’t say a word about my driving; instead he chose to defend himself. As if I really believed he drove too fast. He snapped, “ I don’t drive too fast. What I do is just get it up to speed quickly!” At that point I had a hard time restraining myself. Looking at the speedometer hovering around 62 in a 70 mph zone, a good ten minutes after getting on the highway, all I could say is, “Yes, I guess that must be it.” After all, we were on the highway and how else would I get home?

Dickhead