Wheels
Good Drivers Are Courteous And Polite
Saturday, December 31, 2011
My son Ari, 17, keeps offering to run errands for me. He wants to take me for dinner; he asks if I want snack foods late at night; he asks for rides to school. All of this has nothing to do with me, except for the fact that I must be in the car with him so he can drive.
Once the kids get their G1 licences, I attempt to let them drive whenever they’re in the car. Wheel time is the only way they’ll get experience, and passenger-side handles are attached much more tightly than they used to be.
I leave the instruction to the people I’ve trusted to teach him, but I can’t help interjecting. Like many teens that have just been reading the handbook cover to cover and sitting in a classroom absorbing the ins and outs of road legalities, he has the nuts and bolts down pat. It’s the etiquette I try to address. The ways not just to be right, but to be decent and kind.
Exiting a crowded parking lot the other night, he gazed out at a solid line of cars in the lane he needed to enter. We would be there still, but it was clear that a woman was kindly leaving him a gap. This time of year, this is often the only way to navigate.
“Wave to her,” I told him.
“Why?”
“Because she did something nice for you. Thank her,” I replied. He gave a quick wave as he pulled in front of her.
“Is that like, ‘Merry Christmas’?”
“Maybe, but it’s how we should be every day,” I told him. “Life would be a lot easier if people would just do things like that. You only need to let in one car, and if everyone did that, our traffic would move a lot faster and people wouldn’t be so crabby.”
“But I have to wave?” he asked.
“You know when you hold the door for someone? And they say thank you? If they didn’t say thank you, you’d think they were rude. Same thing.”
“What if it’s those people who cut way down front when they know a lane is ending?” I considered this. There is no cure for arrogance, which is often holding hands with entitlement.
“You don’t have to be polite to them,” I decided.
He navigated carefully across several lanes of rush-hour traffic. I bit my tongue and hoped the traffic around us would realize he was a new driver. And I was reminded once again that nobody knows who is driving any car.
There’s a line from Hill Street Blues in my head whenever I drive. The cop show has been off the air for years, but Sergeant Esterhaus said the same thing in every episode: “Hey, let’s be careful out there.”
The people in the cars around you might be heading home after a great day, but they might also have just lost their wallet, their job, or a loved one. They might be confident drivers, careful people with decades of experience. They might be — like my son — just learning. When the woman left space for our car, she was also making space for all of those things. A small kindness goes a long way.
New Year’s resolutions usually end up on the scrap pile within a month. But if I could have only one, it would be to get everybody home for dinner every night.
Hey, let’s be careful out there.
After five years, this is my last column for Wheels and the Toronto Star. I’ve worked with some wonderful people, but it’s you, the readers, who have made it such a great ride. Thank you for everything you’ve given me. And I do mean all of it: the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. You can find me on my website at www.lorraineonline.ca.
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