I took my driver’s ed class with Mr. Pfeil. He was a phys ed teacher, and for him driving consisted of certain clear, immutable rules of conduct.
The problem is that most people don’t know what to do when they have the urge to merge. Mr. Pfeil would tell you that merging is easy: you look over your left shoulder, gauge traffic flow, select an opening, and accelerate smoothly into that opening. Of course, almost no one does that anymore. These days, it’s far more likely that you’ll run into one of these irksome merging techniques:
The sidler — The sidler relies entirely on pity. Rather than picking a spot and taking decisive action, he will sidle alongside the traffic flow, hoping that some good Samaritan will wave him in. If no good Samaritan appears, he jams on the brakes at the end of the on ramp and makes an wild, thrashing arm-in-the-air gesture. Good luck with that “smooth acceleration” approach if you are behind the sidler!
The magic elf — This driver typically can barely see over the steering wheel, is about 97 years old, and is driving a car built in the 1950s. He apparently is convinced that his turn signal has some mystical power, and so long as the turn signal is on an opening in traffic will magically appear to accept his vehicle. This guy inevitably shows up when you are in the traffic flow, drifting casually into your lane with his turn signal blinking.
The ball buster — The ball buster drives an oversized pickup truck and probably just left his appointment at a low testosterone treatment clinic. He barrels down the on ramp at top speed, jams into the traffic flow at his whim, and makes rude gestures while he is doing so. He figures his truck is going to come out on top in any collision, so what the heck?
I wish more of my fellow drivers had taken Mr. Pfeil’s class.
The p
The focus of hope and potential disappointment was your Valentine’s Day card box. I don’t know whether schools allow them anymore, in this treat-everyone-equally-for-empty-self-esteem-purposes age. Back in the more rough-and-tumble early ’60s, however, every kid made a Valentine’s Day box and brought it to class. The boxes were gaily decorated with red tissue paper or leftover Christmas wrapping paper and hearts, cupids, and doilies, and making them was a big deal. One year I used aluminum foil, aiming for a cool, space-age Valentine’s Day tribute to the Gemini astronauts. Another year, in my quest for a good box, I found one with a flip-top lid in my parents’ closet that would have opened up like an old-fashioned mailbox, rather than requiring you to cut a slot in the top. I asked my very modest mother if I could use that box for Valentine’s Day, but she snatched it away with horror and said she’d find another. At the time, of course, I didn’t have a clue about what a tampon was.
I always felt safe and happy when I was in school. It was where I went to learn from teachers and act in school plays and sing in the school chorus. The only small sign that there was a dangerous world outside the double doors was our periodic “duck and cover” exercise and trip down to the basement in the event of a nuclear attack. I cannot imagine what it would be like, as a grade school student, to walk down the school hallway and see a gunman shooting into classrooms. There could not be a more jarring disconnect, to my sheltered little world, than violence of any kind at a school.
She was the teacher who introduced my third grade class at Rankin Elementary School in Akron, Ohio to the wonders of cursive writing. On the first day of school, she called our attention to the white shapes on green rectangles that appeared in a row above the blackboard, A to Z. They were cursive letters, she explained, and this year we would learn to make them perfectly. The message was clear: we were leaving childish block printing behind and through our writing would be moving onto the road to adulthood.
