Saturday, September 17, 2011

Who's Keeping Score

We have a running joke in the family about who is the better driver; or should I say, really, who is the worst driver. Needless to say, "yours truly" held the record for a very, very long time and was teased and reminded constantly. Thanks boys.

When the kids were young they were with me the time I was backing out of the carport and tore the five foot wooden gate right off the hinges. It had so much momentum it bounced into the yard. Thank goodness I was driving the Mercury Marquee. It was an old yellow station wagon, built Ford tuff. 

Another time I scraped the side of Scout's Toyota as I was backing up in the driveway in my Ford truck. I didn't even see it. Donny scraped the other side.

One time when I was driving through Ringgold, I screeched up to a four-way stop so hard that it threw the timing chain off. Don's step-daddy, Charlie, said he'd never seen anyone do that before. I didn't know whether to be proud of that, or not. I think I was driving the station wagon that time, too. It was like driving a Sherman tank. The car was practically invincible.

I was trying to pull the boat out of a campground.The axle got hung and I nearly pulled the wheels off of the trailer. It was so warped we couldn't drive it home until Don crawled under it and tried to straighten it out. He was afraid I was going to take out some mailboxes on the windy little roads near Harrison Bay. Frankly, I was too.

I've had more close calls than I care to remember. Once I almost ran over some obnoxious woman when I changed lanes in town. I was driving the truck with a big white camper on it and it was hard to see out of the mirrors. I thought I was safe so I moved into the right lane. I pulled into the Chamber of Commerce parking lot and started to get out.

I didn't realize I had cut someone off until a car whipped in beside me and a woman started screaming at me because I had cut her off. She claimed I hadn't given a signal but, since my truck is old you have to turn the signal off and on by hand, I had turned it off when I stopped and couldn't prove it to her.

She was screaming about how I could have killed her baby and wouldn't shut up. I told her I was sorry I hadn't seen her but she must have gotten in my blind spot because I had checked the mirrors. I told her that I wouldn't have hit her baby, I would have hit her side of the car, if anything. She wanted to turn me into the police. I told her to go ahead and tell them what happened and see if they cared. I hadn't done anything on purpose and nobody was hurt so she should shut up. She finally left and I never did see the law.

Those are just a few of the examples of my bad driving record. 

One day Donny, and the kids, and I were in the backyard. Donny was going to move the station wagon. At the time we had a homemade power pole in the middle of the yard. Donny backed clean over that thing! I was so happy. Finally, somebody else had done something stupid while driving. The mantle had been passed. The best part about it was the fact that everybody saw. Scout, Colt, Jason, Allan and I had witnessed it. 

Scout told me about a couple of close calls but he managed to avoid having a wreck. Scout was driving in the country on a holiday when a car veered into his lane and nearly hit him. He said he had to drive halfway in the ditch to dodge the  other vehicle. Scout was afraid he would flip the truck. He thought the driver had to be drunk as a skunk to do that.

Everything was fine until Colt started to drive. He was terrible at tailgating other vehicles. I was always telling him to back off and not get on people's bumpers. Colt drove my Buick to Dalton College every day. One morning he rear-ended a car that was turning in to the school at Valley Point. He called me very upset. He figured I would be furious. I was just grateful that nobody was injured.

I am thankful that the guys will try to fix everything. They worked together to cut and replace the front of my Buick with another front end. Thankfully, with Scout's car expertise and Donny's skill in building, the car was perfectly square. No shop could have done better.

The title of worst driver has been passed on to Scout's girlfriend, Kim, now because she hit Colt's truck after it had been restored. She scraped the fender. She hit it while it was sitting in our driveway. Sound familiar? Welcome to the family, Kim. 

AS ALWAYS
PIO

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