Fool at the Wheel

modelt.jpgI don’t know what it is in the nature of men that makes them like to drive fast. Now I don’t mean just over the speed limit, because without cruise control to exert a little influence, my wife will come home bristling with speeding tickets, while I tend to stick to just a little above—the calculated area of “they won’t bother to ticket me here”. I mean the “let’s see what it can do” style of driving that men seem drawn to, certainly more often when they are a little younger and a lot more foolhardy.

Lately, young men of average means have an interest in cars that just look serious…. Honda Civics and even Chevy Cavaliers dressed up with wings and body fairings, fancy paint jobs, mufflers that sound like you have more under the hood than a four-cylinder designed primarily for economy, and the ubiquitous booming of a thousand watt stereo system with trunk-filling subwoofer. One went by with a lot of noise the other day and I asked, “What was that?” My wife identified it correctly as, “A Cavalier trying to pretend it’s a sports car.” Continue reading

My Mother died last week . . .

My mother passed away last Friday evening. She had been in hospital for the last eight months, a place she never wanted to be, though I think she had little realization of that most of the time she was there. She had taken a seizure of some kind in early December, at the seniors’ home that she never wanted to be in either. Fiercely independent, she tried in vain to avoid these places, knowing that when you enter near her age (91 last week), you seldom leave. Her avoidance of hospitals extended for years to hiding any illness or injury she had– not an ideal practice, since it jeopardized her health and sometimes concealed illness that her children needed to watch for in their own lives. Continue reading