On the Road

By Donna Levin.

One can’t shake the circumstances of one’s birth.  If you are born in France, you are French.  If you are born in Scotland, you are a Scots.

Move away; change your name; dye your hair; fix your nose.  You can run but you can’t hide from your ethnicity.

With one exception:

A driver can become a pedestrian.

In San Francisco one can get by without a car, but usually I’m a driver, either because I’m lazy and spoiled, or because I’m old and tired.  We don’t judge on this platform.

As a driver I hate pedestrians, or “peds.”  “Ped” is a derogatory term that we drivers use among ourselves.  Don’t refer to someone as a ped unless you know your audience.  You know how identity politics work.  (Hint: make reference to “the P word” and you might get away with it.)

Pedestrians are an entitled bunch.  They jump off the curb without warning.  Then they walk very, very slowly, while looking at their phones.

Oh, but God forbid you cross the intersection while they are within an Olympian’s 500-yard dash away from your right front wheel.  Then comes the laser-like glare that can melt your radiator.

In response, I always raise my hands in a gesture of placation and submission.  I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry and let’s not forget mea culpa.  Mea maxima culpa.

Yesterday I took my car to a shop about three-quarters of a mile away.   I walked home.  Not so lazy and spoiled now, am I?

Thus I became what I most fear: a pedestrian.  (We call each other peds and it’s okay when we do.)

And I discovered:

Drivers are an entitled lot.

They talk on their phones.  They drive fast.  They look left while turning right and forget that someone might be in the crosswalk.  (The careful-where-and-when-you-say-it term for drivers is “asshole.”)

On the way back from the auto shop I stepped into an intersection, and almost got hit.  I jumped back, but when I looked up in a most friendly, engaging and forgiving way the jerk held up his hands in mock surrender as if to say, “Oh excuuuse me, you self-righteous ped you.”

I wanted to flag him down, to say that was not giving him The Stare, that I understood him, and that we were brothers, or siblings anyway, under the skin.  He was already two blocks down the road, gusts of rage blowing from his tailpipe.

Several hours of meditation and a bottle of mega-vitamins later I am healing.  I imagine a future in which Drivers and Pedestrians co-exist.  I may not live to see it.  My children may not live to see it.  Yet it is the shining city on the hill of my dreams.

There is, however, no room for bicycle riders in this vision.

Donna Levin is the author of numerous novels, including He Could Be Another Bill Gates, forthcoming this Fall from Chickadee Prince Books.