Yesterday at 5 p.m. I got a reminder on my phone to go pick up my dry cleaning. I especially needed it because I would be giving remarks at a swearing-in ceremony today and I figured I’d need one of those shirts. So I set off to drive the couple of miles to my preferred dry cleaner.

On one of the local surface streets, a two-lane affair incongruously named Whitnall Highway, I found that I was inching along behind a very slow-moving maroon SUV. So when the SUV slowed down even more in order to go over a rather unnecessary speed bump, I pulled into the left lane, passed, and left it behind me.

I kept driving for a while before I began to gather that the SUV was now following me.

When I got to a street light and turned left, it turned left.

When I got to another corner, a small side street, and made a right and it followed me onto that small side street, I was sure.

Finally, I pulled into my friendly local dry cleaner’s, a small business run by a husband and wife who, finally, were able to leave various war-torn Middle Eastern countries behind and arrive in the United States. (I asked the husband at one point where he was from, and got quite a detailed list of the wars and turmoil they’d left behind.) I got out of my car and as I was closing the door, the maroon SUV pulled up behind me on the street. I heard a voice and turned around to see a snarling, twisted-face middle-aged woman absolutely consumed with anger.

“You fucking piece of shit,” she said.

“What?” I said. I said “what” because I couldn’t figure out what else to say.

“You heard me,” she said. “You’re a fucking piece of shit.”

Whether or not that’s true isn’t best determined by me myself, so I sauntered over to learn more.

She hurled more imprecations at me, claiming that the source of her misery was my having passed her. Legally, I might add, and at the speed limit. What I am sure to be true is this:  She is the source of her own misery. If she’s unhappy because I passed her, one can only estimate how she reacts to more consequential things. Her response to this was so great, that I have to figure she exerts a planetary gravitational pull that sucks terrible things into her life. As a friend of mine said today when I told him about this incident, “This is the sort of person who, if a satellite fell out of the sky, it would land on her.”

I approached her window.  Honestly, I was so curious, all I wanted to do was figure out why she was having this response — and maybe using it in a play some day. But as I drew near, she looked alarmed and unsure what I might do. So she started to roll up her window and drive away. I shouted out the only thing that came to mind, the thing that seemed most appropriate and most sure to torment her:  “Merry Christmas!”

What I did not do — and probably should have — was that when she launched into her pointless pursuit of me, pointless because I wasn’t trying to evade her and because she accomplished nothing other than further contributing to the ruin of her own day, when she was chasing me to apparently try to teach me some lesson about passing people (?) — she had run a red light.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 10th, 2016 at 12:50 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.