People In Cars

It's funny how being in a car emboldens us to do things that we would not necessarily do outside of a car.  I pick my nose in my car.  I engage in primal screams in my car.  I make up songs and sing them into my portable recording device in my car.

People in cars are funny.

Today, I was driving in my car, my Great-Aunt-Minnie-Lee-Mobile, when I approached a long line of other cars waiting to get through a left turn lane at a traffic light.  I thought for a moment, "Oh no!" but then I remembered that there was no rush: my destination would be open for a couple more hours.  So I slowed my car to a halt, allowing enough room for some cars waiting at a connecting street to turn left in front of me, and for others to get in front of me in line.  This made the man in the car behind me furious.  

He blew his horn.  I looked into my rear view mirror and saw him gesturing at me.  He put his hands on top of his head and jerked his hair in an upward motion as if he were plumb pulling his hair out.  He shook his head violently as if this gesture would suggest to me what an absolute idiot I was by being polite.  

The light was red.  Traffic was not moving.  Yet I had stalled this man's progress too much.  

Eventually, of course, the light turned green.  And the first stream of waiting cars made it through before it turned red again.  The man in the car behind me continued to make gestures and blow his horn as if that would make all the cars ahead of him move.  He pulled out a portable phone unit and began to make his most exasperated facial expressions as I'm sure he used his most exasperated tone of voice to the person on the other end.  

I listened to happy music and watched the people walking in the warmth of the bright sunshine.  It was a lovely scene, most pleasant to observe while waiting for a green light.  One man walking down the sidewalk wore a brilliantly colored shirt.  I wanted to call out of my window to him.  I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated his shirt.  But I did not want to break the sacred in car, out of car barrier.  It is sort of intrusive when people in cars yell at people outside of cars.  I didn't want to be that person.  If I were outside of a car, I would do this. I let it go.

I occasionally glanced at the man behind me playing an angry cartoon character in his car.  I had an impulse to get out of my car, walk back to this man's car, lean over and say, "Do you really think that by letting a few people out in front of me, you will be any more delayed than you already are?  Why did you not take a different route when you noticed the line of cars ahead?  Are all these melodramatic gesticulations necessary?  What is so all fired important that makes you miss the beauty of the day?" I decided this was a very bad idea.  

Still, I wondered about him.  It must be some sort of survival mechanism for him to behave in this manner, I thought.  He apparently needs to feel inconvenienced by the world around him.  And this is more important to him than pausing to enjoy a moment of stillness.  How tragic.  But his anger is his anger and doesn't need to permeate my psyche.  My ability to transcend his negativity was a personal victory.  In a way, I am celebrating that by writing this blog entry.  Anyway...

The light once again turned green and the few cars ahead of me crawled through the intersection.  The light turned yellow as I approached it and the man behind me blew his horn much longer than he needed to in order to make his point.  I proceeded through the intersection and he raced through a red light.  Once through the intersection, he passed me of course.  My car's bumper was too contemptible for him to bear another second.  It was only after he was down the road a way that it occurred to me, I should have flashed him a peace sign.

Traffic was heavy going into downtown.  Many people in many cars - some patient, others less so -observed the rules of the road, stopping at lights, allowing pedestrians to cross if they were nice, pulling out in front of others if they weren't.  

A boy in a car in front of me was furiously playing the drums on his steering wheel and dashboard.  He was bouncing up and down in his seat and swinging his arms wildly about.  I wanted to know what music he was listening to.  What was causing him to move with such wild abandon in the driver's seat of his car?  I was supremely curious about this.  

I moved into another lane with the notion that I would pull up along side of him and yell out of my window to ask who he was listening to.  Because there was no sacred barrier here. We were both in cars.  But my row of cars moved at a quicker pace than his row of cars and before I could call out to him, I was already past him.  But until I lost sight of him, he continued to play drums on his steering wheel and dash board while bouncing up and down.  

Yep.  People in cars are funny.