Strange Communication

I’m riding back from the store last night with the essentials: beer, ice cream, and tortilla chips.

Crossing Jackson Street from the Red Apple parking lot to Walgreen’s is sometimes a little tricky. Cars drive too fast on Jackson, and there’s often lots of vehicular confusion as cars exit one lot and drive across the street to the other.

I often ride in the crosswalk to cross; cars don’t usually stop for me and I don’t expect them to, but at least I’m more visible. Once to the other side, I then jog left on the sidewalk into the Walgreen’s lot.

And that’s just what I did last night. As I’m doing so, I’m aware of this early 80’s Cadillac Seville, banged-up a bit, with a broken muffler. It, too is making the cross from Red Apple to Walgreens, gunning its unmuffled engine as it does so.

I’m about parallel with it as we cross; then I nip inside it from the sidewalk, thinking we’ll both go on our merry way.

The guy stops hard, though, and starts jawing at me.

“You’ve got to decide what you are, man! You’ve got to either be on the road or on the sidewalk! You wanna be a car, be a car. You wanna be a pedestrian, be a pedestrian! You can’t be both!”

I think he’s drunk and I don’t want to get into it with him, so I just smile and nod, thanking him for his advice.

But he just keeps going: “I don’t see you, I could run you over!”

I assure him I’m even less interested in being hit than he is in hitting me but it doesn’t seem to register. He’s in full rant mode, raging about how he’s lived in the neighborhood fifty years, how he’s sixty-five years old and has never had an accident.

I realize now it doesn’t matter what I say, so I just shrug, tip my cap and pedal off.