Friends,
There’s the old saw around these parts about moving day in Ocean Beach. You call your buddy with a pickup to help on Saturday morning at the end of the month and he assures you that he’ll show up at the appointed hour. Back when this was an ongoing problem for me, we didn’t have cell phones, so we’d wait around for hours and hours for the guy, then give up and strap furniture to the tops of cars. Days later, when we’d cross paths, he would always give the excuse, “Oh man, I totally flaked.” No apology, just a statement of the obvious.
Today, there’s a hand gesture for that. It’s the old man wave. The one where you’re driving down a country road and pass an older gentleman walking on the shoulder. Should you wave, his wave back is subtle. An acknowledgement, but nothing more than expending the least energy possible to lift a hand to the point where you might see the palm, but probably not. You may even get the closest to zero angle nod that he can muster, but don’t count on it.
I was walking the dog this morning with one of those extending leads that can reel out twenty feet or so. Mme. Puppy Dog was about five feet away when some jamoke in one of those execrable Lincoln LS abominations cut in close around the blind right hand corner where we were standing. The dog’s natural response was to rush out into the street, of course, restrained only by my twirling around, gathering the lead around my midsection. This particular road is a dead end, so he had to turn around and when he passed us coming down the street he gave us the old man wave. In this context, it clearly meant, “Dude, I totally flaked when I went around that corner too fast and almost killed your dog.” Or at least that’s what I took from it. Windows rolled up, still driving too fast, no apology.
I later drove down the hill to the post office, when a woman in a black Lincoln LS (no kidding) full of passengers, backed out of her driveway without looking, 50 feet in front of my Jeep. My stop looked more panicky than it was, since the Jeep’s suspension is very soft and allows all sorts of crazy nosedive during these things. I stopped in time and was greeted with, yeah, the old man wave.
It seems like piling on at this point, but my drive back from the post office involved waiting for an extended period of time for another person to back out into my street and negotiate putting their mid-sized American sedan into Drive to get into a lane. This guy figured it out eventually then offered the old man wave.
Now what you’re thinking is, “This seems pretty minor in the scheme of things,” but it’s not in a respect that I’ll get to a couple posts from now. The thrust of this argument is that piloting two tons of machinery around shouldn’t be considered a casual endeavor. These things are dangerous and require skill and attention. If you’re missing either of those attributes, somebody could really get hurt. “But what about all of the safety devices we have now?” I hear you ask. Those things keep you from, on the whole, getting killed, not from getting hurt. And hurt very badly indeed.
Keep your eyes peeled! More tomorrow,
– bob