let’s hear it for SUV drivers
6 March 2007, 6:51 pmAt least, let’s hear it for two of them.
Buying an SUV is the product of a decision-making process I can’t imagine myself following, and SUV drivers are often notably rude to pedestrians and cyclists alike.
I try not to pre-judge, but sometimes I do. I’m generally prepared for a negative outcome from any particular SUV encounter — which creates opportunities to be pleasantly surprised now and then, as I was, twice, today.
- AM. I’m waiting a crosswalk. Traffic is clear in one direction, but not the other. I haven’t actually begun to cross (which in MA technically/theoretically obligates all motorists to stop). The vehicle in the not-clear direction stops and motions me across. I’m always surprised when an SUV does this, but it has happened before and I don’t usually feel obligated to make note of it. However, in this particular case the vehicle in question was a Hummer, and simple courtesy from that quarter is utterly unprecedented in my experience.
- PM. As I’m crossing a street, a gust of wind blows my hat right off my head waaaay uppinuh air and diagonally across an intersection in exactly the wrong direction. I spare it a backward glance, and after considering a) the hat’s trajectory, b) how much my wunnerful girlfriend doesn’t really care for this hat, c) how physically great I don’t feel at this moment*, and d) how filthy it’s likely to have gotten on its first brush with the black slush of Cambridge, my inclination is to write it off as an act of involuntary littering. I grit my teeth, and press on into the wind. It’s mebbe half a block later that I realize that a honking vehicle at the curb is trying to attract my attention. The driver rolls down the window to hand me my hat back. (Exactly how the hat wound up inna vehicle I have no idea — I was oblivious to any Chinese-firedrill-action. Maybe it blew in through a window? But I really am grateful to you, whoever you are, even if I didn’t put the hat right back on my head.)
* Later, the difficulty of finding the right flu medsin — so many boxes! so many colors! all throbbing, throbbing! — nearly makes me scream/burst into tears/spontaneously combust/et cetera, if that helps put my reluctance to run a foot race with an errant flying hat in perspective.
Those are both great stories, worth posting. I have had bad experiences with minivans. I think they must be too cocoon-like, or people in them are just really preoccupied with their own lives. Like you, I don’t like to generalize, but I have had repeated bad experiences with minivans, both when I was driving my car on the road with them and when I was a pedestrian.
My theory is: the person in the Hummer was not the owner (maybe the owner’s s/o, son, daughter) who was obligated for some reason to drive the vehicle. Out of guilt and discomfort (the presence of which feelings while driving a Hummer already speak in the driver’s favor), courtesy prevailed. The alternate theory is that someone is disgusting-pig enough to buy a Hummer and yet somehow also considers fellow human beings. I suppose a huge disconnection between the personal and the global is common enough for that to be the case…
How much do I love it when my cranky assumptions are proven wrong? A lot! I’ve been trying to let the people who breach my cynical expectations know how much they rock when they do something nice: pause as they enter the T station and hold the door for a couple of seconds to let me catch up and enter, call out “Miss! Miss!” (leagues better than “Ma’am! Ma’am!”) to let me know that a receipt fell out of my coat pocke onto the sidewalkt, or see that I’ve been shoved into the middle of a solid-pack subway car and ask if I need to grab onto the holdy pole — then angle their body so I can do so.
What does it say about me that when I read your comment above and noticed the “t” missing in “coat pocke[t],” when I saw the *extra* “t” on “sidewalkt” (which is what they have in Germany, I think), I immediately deduced that you’d probably originally omitted the phrase “onto the sidewalk,” went back to add it in, but accidentally placed the cursor before rather than after the final “t” that was originally in the word “pocket”? (Answer: that I’m avoiding reading student papers right now and will take any excuse.)
My guess — the “t” was blown out of its original home to another word by a fierce gust of wind. It got kind of mucky on the sidewalk — just like my hat! — so Editrix preferred leaving the “t” on the sidewalk, rather than putting it back in her pocket.