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“I hate when I am all set on running a yellow light and the guy in front of me chickens out!” — Unknown

I was at a high school football game week ago and as Rhonda and I were sitting in the bleachers during pregame warm-ups a rap song was loudly blaring over the loudspeaker. The chorus of the song were the words that correspond to KMA. If you don’t know what that acronym stands for, e-mail me and I will tell you. The last word rhymes with sea bass.

I am not a prude and in no way did the song offend me. But this was a high school crowd with young families attending and kids from elementary to middle school ages in the crowd. I just don’t understand the rules of polite public behavior and standards anymore.

Driving has become my pet peeve. I know most people do not spend an entire summer in the classroom and on the road learning driving etiquette like my generation had to do to get a driving license.

Mr. Cress and Mr. Hutsler were task masters when I was behind the wheel. After classroom instruction until noon students split up the next few hours taking turns learning to drive. As a parent I have always proclaimed that being in the car when my son was learning to drive was the most unpleasant task for me as a father.

All I am saying is that from my experience as a driving instructor for my son, he had no instinctive expertise. During one of the first attempts as I remember calmly saying to him, “You need to get over before the next Stop sign.” He started to immediately whip into the car adjacent to us in the right-hand lane. Suddenly my calm demeanor went out the window, which was now micrometers from the other car’s driver’s side mirror.

There are two basic tenets of old school driving I do not see on the roadways much these days. Well, to be honest there are more than two, but two that seem fairly universally lacking in driving skills on the road.

Parallel parking is a lost art. I do not know the final number of orange cones I demolished in the Jeff High parking lot before I could parallel park, but to this day I am fairly good at it. There are a couple of components to the skill. The first and most foremost basic is that the spot has to be large enough for your car to fit into it by parallel parking.

I love watching people attempt to parallel park a Ford Expedition into a parking spot too small for a Volkswagen Beatle. And you know one would think after a couple of attempts it would be obvious. But I have watched a driver make three or four attempts and wondered if depth perception was totally lacking.

Then there is the other extreme. There are two empty parking spots, and the person cannot fit an economy size car into them. I have witnessed several attempts and seen a driver simply give up and drive on seemingly searching for an open three spots.

The other thing that I sometimes keep score on while driving is the number of people who are not aware of the most fundamental accessories to a car. By that I am referring to turn signals. A simple rule to follow for safety and courtesy would be, if your car has turn signals, you should use turn signals.

I challenge anyone reading this to observe and count the number of times a driver who should use a turn signal but does not. Seriously, keep an actual score and I think the number of times during a routine driving trip might surprise you. If you drive 10 or more miles in normal traffic, I bet you cannot stay under a score of 5.

When I took the driver’s exam a sure way to fail was to turn without a proper turn signaling. It is so automatic for me thanks to my driving instructors that I use mine when there are no other cars in sight and I am turning onto a country road. It is automatic. It is like turning the key into the ignition to start the engine.

To even begin to describe a sample of the bone-headed moves I have witnessed in the last week would take an entire column. People at a 4-Way Stop and facing me. I start to drive straight and they, without any signal, turn across the intersection right in front of me. “Hey, let me in on the secret, will you?”

Then there are cases where I am aghast when someone uses a turn signal. Not long ago I was driving around 60 miles per hour on I-64 West right before the Grinsted Road exit. I am in the fast lane as well as the other driver. Suddenly right at the exit two lanes over she stopped without warning. After she stopped, she turned on her right turn signal. She had missed the exit and since she was the most important driver on the road thought she would stop in the fast lane and wait until the right lane was clear so she would not miss her exit.

After miraculously stopping in time not to rear-end her car after a sudden stop in the fast lane on an Interstate Highway, I looked in the rear-view mirror hoping I did not get rear-ended by a semi-trailer. After a couple of cars passed by in the right lane, she calmly steered over two lanes and exited the Interstate.

As one might imagine, I was not happy with the other driver. My pulse rate was pretty high, and I might have started to talk aloud to myself. I might have even started repeating the words to a song I heard at a high school football game recently.

I believe I might have actually uttered the words kiss my sea bass. At least words to that effect that rhyme!

Lindon Dodd is a freelance writer who can be reached at lindon.dodd@hotmail.com

The Clarksville Challengers team is made up of players living with disabilities from across Southern Indiana.

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