SCREWBALLS, TALKING, DRIVING

Left: Screwball?

If not, I think that batter better hit the deck.

The young like to say, “That’s so random.”

At a dinner party, a husband says about his wife: “She’ll find something to wipe.”

At another dinner party, a sixty-something mother is trying out loud not to worry about her forty-something son, who’s recently divorced from someone named Susan. Aging mom says, “He’s got gum wrappers from when he was dating—you know, other girls, not Susan.”

Two of the greatest inventions of the last few decades are the TV clicker and air conditioning in cars. Yet a surprising number of people—smokers or not—keep their car windows down in hot city traffic. Why? The noise, the grime, the heat. It can’t be true that all those air conditioners are broken. Maybe there’s a secret outbreak of claustrophobia that CNN hasn’t discovered. Maybe “breath of fresh air” has been re-defined to fit our times, to include sucking suet.

In case you haven’t tried it already, next time you’re sitting at a red light, watch the cars making a left turn toward you. Yes, most of them cut it too close. But also look at the drivers’ faces. Compose their story in your head. Where are they going? Where are they coming from? What just happened? Is anyone having a happy moment while turning left? Once again those lines from W.H. Auden: “Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd. Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.”

How about the woman sitting behind you, on her cell phone, performing a full-blown soap opera or declaration of war? How can a mouth move that fast, that aggressively? Is it just gusto? Enthusiasm? Her whole head bobs like a chicken on crack. And the free arm is flailing with such vigor that she could be roping a calf. What’s the story of the day between her ears?

I hear someone shouting, Why a woman, you stereotyping pig?

Because that’s the picture I’ve seen, far more than once. The men are having a contest with themselves to see how close they can come to my rear bumper—or my left taillight as they whip around me. Some women do that too, but their mouths aren’t curled in a snarl. They’re having a happy moment, and space is irrelevant.