No Place for Southern Grace, Charm on L.A. Roads

Many years ago, when I was 12, my grandmother let me drive her 1970 Buick Le Sabre. The way Nana figured it, somebody had to chauffeur her the seven miles between home and the Shirley Ann School of Beauty in Lebanon, Tenn., for her weekly wash-’n’-set. Might as well be me; I could touch the pedals and see over the wheel.

Thanks to this early and illegal driver’s education course, I’ve always felt comfortable driving. But when we arrived in Los Angeles from Tennessee three years ago, I felt almost virginally nervous the first time I maneuvered my way from Pasadena to Glendale in rush-hour traffic. A sissy commute on the 134--I know that now--but it was something for which not even Nana could have prepared me.

In the South, women adhere to certain rules that have become so ingrained through the generations that I think they’re now part of our genetic makeup: Never phone a boy, never ask what’s for dinner, and never ever wear patent leather shoes before Memorial Day. (Though I have come to question the validity of the patent leather law, I still abide by it; you will never catch me in a pair before June 1.) The most important rule of all, though, is this: Be nice to everybody, whether you mean it or not. This applies at church, school and, especially in an age when road rage is more virulent than kudzu, on the open road.

I was raised to let other drivers change lanes in front of me without complaint. I was taught to extend a thank-you wave when someone returned the favor, and never to shake my fist at anyone who cut me off in traffic--especially if the driver was in a pickup truck with a gun rack stretched across the back window.

But the day I headed onto the westbound 134, I felt some of my Southernness begin to wilt. It was survival of the fittest here. There was no time for grace or charm when jockeying for lane position. I tried to be nice. Nobody noticed. Drivers would swerve into my lane, barely missing my front bumper, then shake their fist at me as though I had forced them to be reckless.

L.A. driving veterans know all too well that the daily stress of navigating through four, five, sometimes six lanes of rush-hour traffic can have a cumulative negative effect on a person--especially on someone who grew up in a place where only two interstates passed through.

So it probably surprised no one but me that after spending 15 months trying politely to negotiate big-city traffic, it finally happened. I was making a left turn on a yellow light when a Mercedes sedan raced through the intersection and almost hit my car. Before I knew it, I had broken Nana’s 11th Commandment (she always said Moses drew up an extra two or three for his Southern fundamentalist brethren): “Thou shalt not use thy middle finger to express thy wrath.”

I did it reflexively and effortlessly, as though I had as much experience flipping my finger as I do making corn bread. Maybe I should have been stripped of my Southern Belle title, or at least forced to wear a scarlet letter for a month or two. Yet it also was an awakening for me--a realization that I could hold my own on the roads of my new hometown. A sort of motoring steel magnolia, that’s me.

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Regular Drive Time columnist Mary McNamara returns from pregnancy leave next week.