NO ACCIDENT

I almost died the other day. I almost had an accident. And it was all my fault.

I am not a great driver. I am not a good driver. I didn’t start driving until late in life and so I am a perpetually anxious driver. And when I say anxious I don’t mean that I drive cautiously because I am also a very impatient driver so the combination of anxiety and impatience can lead me to drive very stupidly like I did last week.

I have pet peeves about other drivers. I hate people cutting me off, especially when there is no one behind me. What? You can’t wait the whole two seconds to let me pass?

My personal favorite is the person who cuts me off and then drives very, very slowly in front of me. Below the speed limit. So — you were in such a hurry you had to cut me off  — but now that you cut me off you have all the time in the world to crawl along down the road. Gee, thanks.

Then there are the people who don’t use turn signals. I’m just supposed to intuit — at 40 mph — that you’re going to jam on your brakes and turn. Thanks, again. This annoying behavior is further compounded when they jam on the brakes at 40 mph to turn – and do this in front of me when they have an enormous turn lane to use. Turn from the @#%! turn lane! Assholes. Oops.

So there’s a taste of how I feel about other drivers.

Last week I’m stuck behind this idiot driving below the speed limit through three streets and three turns. We are approaching a busy intersection where I want to turn left to get over the freeway. Three lanes of traffic in each direction and it’s a long wait for the light if you miss it. I’m already fuming when I see my light is green and Poke-Along is going to make me miss it. Luckily for me, I think, there’s a second inside lane I can take to turn and still make this light. I floor it as the light turns yellow and whip around the corner. Did I mention it rained heavily the night before after months of drought? No? I wasn’t thinking about it, I know that.

I began to fishtail towards the wooded median. I remembered something about turning into a swerve. That made it worse. (They say you’re not supposed to brake but good luck not braking when you’re about to crash into something) I frantically whipped the wheel back the other way. I fishtail in the other direction. I whip the wheel back  and now I’m looking at the trees almost perpendicular to the median, thinking this is how I am going to die. I wrench the wheel back and  I am fishtailing into the other lane, bracing for the impact of a multiple-car pileup. (Remember — the light changed behind me as I turned.) I crank it back one more time the other way and finally regain control. There is no multi-car pileup because obviously nobody moved, they were all watching me, the Idiot, almost kill myself. I have all three lanes to myself as I approach the highway overpass. I’m not hyperventilating from shock because I’m too busy cringing in shame. If I could have picked my car up like a big cardboard box — and tiptoed across the freeway, I would have.

I could have killed people. People taking their kids to school. (It was 8:30 in the morning.) I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t even in a real hurry. I was driving to Target to buy laundry detergent, which, I might add, I wasn’t even out of yet. I am an idiot. I am an asshole. The only reason I ran the yellow in the first place was because I was so annoyed at the driver in front of me. Had I been alone in the lane, I would have never run the yellow. I endangered myself for nothing — which is embarrassing. But I endangered other people — for no good reason at all — which is unforgivable.

And it’s only by the grace of God, a Higher Spirit, my guardian angels — take your pick — that I’m here, privileged to only be deeply ashamed instead of dead, dying, maimed or worse — having inflicted death and injury and pain and sorrow on others because I was in a hurry.

Don’t be in a hurry. Life is short.