Confessions of a Road Menace
She was exactly the kind of driver I hate: oblivious, self-centered and imprecise. She sat in the left turn lane for minutes, missing several opportunities to proceed before arbitrarily deciding to make a right, just as amber blinked to red. A little farther down the road, she impatiently pulled out in front of another car, which had to brake to avoid hitting her, when if she had waited but one more minute the road would have been clear. She drifted a bit from lane to lane, slowing as she obviously busied herself with some little non-driving-related chore. She was irritating. She was a menace. And she was me.
It’s so awful to become the driver that you hate, the one that regularly allows you to vent all that pent-up, cubicle-bound, family-fueled frustration; the one that makes you feel morally superior and automotively athletic. Yet in the space of six miles or so the other day, I drove as if possessed by Mr. Magoo. Oh, I could sing you a sad song about extenuating circumstance--general lack of sleep, the toddler whose new hobby is flinging everything to the floor and then wailing in despair until it is returned to her, and the rain of course. I hate the rain. Sometimes I see me stalled out on the 134 in it.
But it doesn’t wash--there are a million excuses and distractions in the naked city and still we are all expected to signal before we change lanes, to come to a full stop at stop signs, to do our level best not to inflict bodily harm on fellow motorists, either through collision or apoplexy. It’s part of the social contract, which apparently is one of those pink or yellow pages you sign here, here, initial there, sign here and then here when you purchase a car.
So I was left with regret, which is rarely a good thing, and humility, which almost always is. One of the things I love best about driving in Los Angeles is that it keeps me humble. How could it not? Here we are, millions of us, with our myriad backgrounds, preoccupations and degrees of mental wellness, in control of a several-ton vehicle moving at speeds that for the vast majority of human history were unimaginable.
We travel distances in a morning commute that would have taken most of the people who have lived before us days if not weeks. We drive roads that rise into the sky and go through the Earth, following a system of signals that didn’t exist a century ago and now seem as essential a part of human discourse as hello and goodbye.
But usually I forget all that. Mostly I drive as if it were my birthright, and if someone is driving too slowly or traveling too closely behind, if someone pulls out and makes me brake or cuts in at the last minute, I am more than happy to criticize them. Not just their driving, but their entire personal histories, family relationships and flaws of character. Right there. In my car. Where I am certain it will help them become better people.
It certainly helps me feel like better people. “Sometimes people can make you nuts,” my 3those-year-old commented the other day when I was offering my thoughts on a woman who had just about sideswiped us in a parking lot. Clearly, this was something he had heard all too frequently. “What kind of nuts, Mama?” he asked a minute later. “Peanuts? ‘Cuz I like peanuts. Don’t you like peanuts?”
Fortunately, every so often, God or Someone looks down and decides I need a little vehicular humility and suddenly I become the worst, most distracted, least focused driver on the planet. And I see there is nothing malicious in my mistakes, nothing hateful in my bad decisions. I am just having a bad day, which is probably what is happening for 95% of those people who annoy me so much. It’s nice to be reminded of this; humility brings me a little closer to heaven, a little closer to grace.
And I happen to like peanuts quite a bit.
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Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.
