A Slow Driver is Anyone Ahead of Us

The car ahead of me was plodding along.

It was moving a mile an hour faster than if it had been parked.

The driver apparently found driving the speed of a herd of turtles to be invigorating. He was accomplishing as much as if he were milking a Plymouth Rock chicken.

As an impatient teenager, I would have mumbled in the direction of the aggravation on wheels, something like, “Put it in gear, the radiator fan won’t pull it.”

I remember playing littler-than Little League baseball when the coaches constantly reminded us to hustle on and off the field each and every inning.

The guy ahead of me wasn’t hustling.

He didn’t have his four-way flashers on, and I hoped he wasn’t having car trouble. Maybe he’d received a plethora of speeding tickets. He couldn’t have been doing a crop inspection by windshield in March. He might have been in a Zoom meeting or had more wisdom than the rest of us. Or perhaps it was the 43rd anniversary of the day his goldfish ran away, and he was dealing with the pain of that memory.

It was St. Patrick’s Day, when all the traffic lights are green. I was on my way to buy some green bananas to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

It was a road that didn’t welcome passing another, so the line behind him grew longer. He was a pariah, held in contempt by the rest of the driving world.

My mother-in-law was stopped by a police officer while driving home after her shift at the Walmart fabric department. She loved that job. She didn’t love getting pulled over for driving too slowly. Ignorance of the law was her excuse. She didn’t know it was possible to drive too slowly. Her husband wasn’t a fast driver, but one of her sisters was a both-hands-on-the-wheel-shoulders-rared-back-and-pedal-to-the-metal driver. Her husband had done most of the driving. After he died, she did all the driving. She had never put gas in a car before. Her three daughters showed her how to do that at a gas pump at the Co-op station. She got the hang of it, but she’d only pump gas at that particular station at the one pump where she had learned. Perchance she’d shared the story about pumping gas with the patrolman. I can’t say. But I know she got off with a verbal warning softened by a “Have a great day, ma’am.”

She wasn’t the one behind the wheel when a police officer pulled over a car with five elderly women in it. Approaching the car, he noticed that all the women, except the driver, were pale and wide-eyed. “I wasn’t speeding!” protested the driver. The officer told her she wasn’t stopped for speeding, but for going too slow. The driver said, “Why was I pulled over? I was driving the exact speed limit – 14 mph.” The officer smiled and said that 14 was the highway number and not the speed limit. The woman nodded and thanked the officer for his concern. Before leaving the woman with a warning, he asked if everyone else was OK in the car. The driver responded, “They will be in a minute. We just turned off Highway 169.”

How do we deal with someone driving slowly in front of us? Some become an automotive cattle prod, driving within a breath of the slowpoke’s rear bumper. Some cuss a blue streak. Others honk the horn or offer hand gestures, believing that would magically fix everything. I don’t do any of those things and I don’t stew. Why ruin another’s day? I’m a leave-early, proper-distance follower.

If he was the slowest driver in the state, what did that make me? I was behind him.

All he needed was a “I may be slow, but I’m ahead of you” bumper sticker.

We speed because we need to save a few seconds. Drivers pass school buses with more blinking lights than a Pink Floyd concert. Insane drivers pass in no-passing zones and in the “right turn only” lanes in intersections.

Everyone was in a hurry, except the guy ahead of me.

Following a driver is not a cruel and unusual punishment, even if I had dirt to scratch and eggs to lay.

He and I lumbered along happily.