The Veruca Salt Driving School

Reality to Earth . . . Watch out before you kill someone . . . Me, for one.

In the past week I would like to thank whatever arm of providence has seen fit to allow the reflexes I had as a teenager to suddenly and miraculously make a few guest appearances, not only by the ability to cut the speed of my car in a timely manner, but also by practically mind-merging me with my steering system to keep us both intact in our factory-original pieces.

I would also like to offer warnings to certain outside agents, like the driver of the black car in the center lane the other night who cut across my lane to get to an exit at over 60 miles per hour and missed my front bumper by all of six inches . . . Like the nimrod in another black car who ran a red light in New Rochelle, New York last Friday going the wrong way on a one way street. (I was quicker on that one. He missed me by a foot) . . . To my two "friends" on Sunday who thought a road full of mid-Mother's Day traffic somehow resembled the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and shot past me from right to left, changing lanes without signaling at about 80.

Once again . . . Six inches.

And they were only three examples. I could go on further, but the point is made. Outside of the racer boys, who need to find a track where throwing a ton and a half of steel and plastic around a high speeds can be a diversion best kept to themselves, I find myself thinking of one Veruca Salt, or at least an image of the child actress in the red dress playing her. I can see her, having made it to the age of driving, howling at her father/driving instructor "But I want to get there NOW, Daddy!"*

Getting there now involves getting there. In one piece. Intact.

I drive at a pretty good rate of speed, staying with, ahead of, or out of the way of the flow of traffic, depending on which tactic the situation requires. I'm not the guy doing forty in the fifty-five zone, not by a long shot. To be fair, they can drive me almost as nutty as the guy who passes me and cuts across three lanes of traffic right-to-left at eighty.

It's crazy out there, ladies and gents. Gas is expensive, but lives are a lot more precious. Listen to a traffic report on your local news station almost any day and you'll be amazed at what's going on. Example - A cluster of accidents occurred in near-comic sequence inside of only a five-mile span and completely screwed up traffic in most of the state of Connecticut for a time this past weekend. To my knowledge, no one was carried away from them under a sheet, but almost 33000 people last year weren't that lucky.

Maybe it's possible we're heading for the right track; that was the lowest number in 60 years, but it's still a sobering figure which can be dropped a lot lower. The crackdown on driving drunk helps. Let's really go for it by eliminating driving stupid.


*For those of you into the trivia, Julie Dawn Cole, the original Veruca Salt from the 1971 "Willy Wonka" movie, grew up to be a distinctly, pleasantly non-bratty looking actress who currently teaches children her craft in England. (In beautiful downtown Blog-World, you check things like this out sometimes to make sure specific people haven't had bad experiences with the things you're talking about.)