Gridlock

Thursday afternoon in Towson, MD. I took the afternoon off to go the hospital where Mom has been for two weeks. She will be released in a week, and the rehab staff and the physical therapist wanted to talk to me and my sister Robin about what Mom will need once she's home. Robin is excellent at keeping track of doctors and medications and the who-needs-to-do what of Momcare. It's going to take a combination of family members and outside helpers to care for Mom until she's over this broken back that has had her down since July.

Anyway, I get to the intersection of Towsontown Bl and York Rd. York Rd is the main drag through Towson, our county seat. You can take York Rd all the way into Baltimore City, but wise motorists go the other way and take it all the way to York PA.

As it happens, some of the motorists I saw were not particularly wise. There was some sort of road work going on south of where I was trying to cross over York Rd, and some people seemed intent on setting a record for most cars locked in a gridlock. There were five cars sitting in the intersection - the very intersection that my eastbound friends and I all wished to cross. Our light turned green, but we could not proceed because of the five gridlocked cars.

Now, anyone who has been driving for more than a week or two has probably been in one of these situations, either as the gridlocker or as the gridlockee. I enjoyed sitting there, knowing that even for as long as the light was green for us, we weren't going to move. In the past, I might have opened my window and hollered invectives at the inconsiderate mopes who were blocking us. Not any more! I sat and thought about how many times I had gone through that intersection: some good memories, some not so sweet. I used to take that way home from shifts at 911, and it was so good to be going home.

And I enjoyed watching the reactions of the people in the cars that blocked the road. Two of them were occupied by business-type guys, men with ties and things on their minds. I figured they were looking ahead down the road with that "if I stare straight ahead, I won't have to see anyone looking daggers at me" look. One car, I can't tell you who was driving; they had the windows so dark. One car had two couples- some people in their 70's, it seemed to me - and they were just having a fit at the very idea of causing people to be angry with them. You could see the man in the back seat - wearing one of those Guayabera dress shirts that also could be a jacket in a pinch, that he must have ordered from an ad in PARADE magazine one slow Sunday - waggling his finger, jawing at the driver, telling him to zig over here and zag over there and just get out the way! But the driver paid him no mind.

Another driver paying no mind was a young man whose very being defined "cool." First tipoff: he had his seat back in such a reclining position that he really appeared to be in a La-Z-Boy recliner. I mean really, he was perfectly positioned for a nap, or a colonoscopy. Second, he was flapping his gums on his cell phone. Third, he positioned his eyelids to such a low point over his peepers that the road ahead could only have been an itty-bitty little slit. Perhaps that's why he kept on sliding through the intersection even as it became obvious that the highly polished rear end of his car would stick way out in the road. He did not care. His countenance told us that we should all feel fortunate to be on the same road as he.

Somewhere down the road, all of us will have the chance to be trapped in an embarrassing situation - one more or less of our own making. We can only hope to get through it with grace and humor, and without being seen wearing one of those Guayabera shirts. That would just make it awful.