Everyone who has ever driven a car knows at least one certified back
seat driver. There's at least one, but preferably six or seven, residing within every family tree, hanging
from it's branches like chestnuts. These are the people who will shout directions as loudly as
possible from the back seat of your car while you are sitting at an
intersection. The only rule for this exercise is that more than one
person has to be shouting at the same time and all of the
instructions must be different. If they can do it in several
different languages, that's a bonus. While there may only be one
actual certified back seat driver, all the rest of them are
practicing wannabes and absolutely none of them actually know where
they are going or how to get there from wherever you happen to be.
I have been in the
driver's seat enduring this kind of turmoil myself, and let me tell
you, it is not easy nor is it fun to be driving on unfamiliar
territory whilst hauling passengers who all think they know exactly
where to go and are trying to out shout each other in the back seat.
On one particular occasion, I made it to my destination without killing anyone, but on the way home, I finally gave up and stopped at a
beauty parlor to ask directions. This was the primo moment where my passengers could have spoken up with their pearls of wisdom, but nope, they were suddenly as silent as guppies at that moment, their rear ends firmly planted in
their seats like children in time out.
Inside the beauty
parlor I asked a woman with gobs of white goop all over her hands,
which way to get back on the freeway. She wiped off her hands on a
towel, got a pen and some paper, and proceeded to instruct. This, I
was to discover, was another back seat driver wannabe. Oh, she knew
how to get there all right, but she for darn sure, was not going to
tell me. “Turn right as you leave our lot,” she advised, swinging
her hand in the general direction of the parking lot….or Texas.
“Then go straight for two blocks until you get to the rail road
tracks, cross them and turn left and go straight until you pass a
school building. If you pass the school you have gone too far. Turn
around and go back.”
A pause….a very long
pause occurred….the kind that authors like to describe as
'pregnant'. I guessed that at that point, her dissertation, for some
reason, was over. I decided that prompting was in order if I wanted
to go any further than the local high school. “And once I've passed
the school and turned back? I assume there is a preferred road I
should have taken somewhere along the way.” She blinked and the
spell, whatever it was, perhaps caused by the fumes from the bleach
job occurring in the corner, was broken. “Oh. Right. Take Fortune
Drive all the way to its end and you will see the sign for I 75”.
I smiled and thanked
her, and it was at that point that the back seat drivers occupying
the “maintenance” chairs with various hairdo's under
construction, all spoke up at once. “No, not Fortune Drive! Take
Oak Avenue!! That one leads directly to I 75.” Another shouted over
her, “no, take Cedar Street for two blocks, turn right on Oak, then
left on Chestnut. That is the quickest way to the turnoff.” A very
recently blonde woman way back in the corner, from whose head the
most fumes were radiating, stood up and shouted above everyone
else….”Which freeway is she looking for again? I only know how to
get to I 75 from here.” Then she promptly sat down, shut up, and
went back into her bleach-fume coma, never apparently, to speak
again.
I gritted my teeth and
attempted another smile, which totally wiped the grin from the
hairdresser's face. For a moment there she looked a little
frightened, as if Jack the Ripper had just strolled into her shop.
“Just go down Fortune Drive like I told you.” She showed me the
world's worst impression of a road map, complete with scribbles for
the rail road track, an X for the forbidden high school and a glob of white goop for the mysterious
Fortune Drive, which none of the other women in the shop had
apparently ever heard of. The paper looked like a monkey had
scratched it out while hopped up on bananas. I said, “thank you”,
took my (ahem) map and left the building.
I was doomed and I knew
it. I was never going home again for as long as I lived. I would
spend the rest of my life in a vehicular purgatory, driving around in
circles, forever looking for the elusive freeway that supposedly
would take me back home. I got back in the car and shoved the “map”
into someone's lap and turned the key in the ignition. This was the
cue. The voices in the backseat started to question, then speculate,
then instruct. I started to make the turn the woman had specified,
only to find myself in the parking lot of the business next door. I
looked up to find six startled pairs of eyes watching me from the
windows of the beauty parlor and a few really frightened ones from the windows of the
business next door.
I reversed direction
and tried again, with the chorus in high gear behind me. I followed
the directions best I could and actually found a rail road track. My
hopes soared. I began looking for Fortune Drive. Three trips past the
all too familiar high school later, I still had not found the drive
in question. I stopped at another business, this one apparently
operated solely by a twenty-something woman reading a book and
looking bored. “Where is Fortune Drive?” My voice quavered. “I'm
trying to find I 75 so I can get home.” I must have looked
particularly desperate. She closed up the book and set it down.
“You wouldn't happen
to be coming from the truck show, would you?” She asked with an
unimaginable certainty in her voice. I was surprised but I nodded
yes. “How'd you know?” She laughed. “I've had six people come
in here already this morning asking that same question. It seems they
all stopped at the beauty parlor over on sixth street….”
Well, to make a long
story short, there was no road called Fortune Drive as it's name had
changed about five years previously, and when I found the newly named
road in question, it was nowhere near a high school and it led
directly to I 75.…and home.
The
moral of the story? Never listen to a backseat driver…especially one who is high on bleach fumes and living five years in the past.
:)
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