The Judicious Driver – Adam Johnson
December 13, 2024
This is a one-page history, because his biography is not worth two. There is a great deal that could be said about his life. His name was Ernest Langdon. Or perhaps it was Henry Frontenaque. Perhaps his name is me. That is probably enough about the man. That is probably enough about life. Let us continue.
My name is.
But is my name important?
Every day I wake. I consider it no more than a byproduct of sleep. Thank you for coming.
At the age of fifteen I took a tremendous interest in driving and the female waist. On the topic of the former, I had planned to purchase a white-walled liberty machine with money saved from various and horrible pubescent jobs. I was a reserved, modest child, a bit miserly if I may speak frankly among stranger-readers. I cared a great deal for detective novels in accordance with your Hallmark sentiment. Now, a qualification: I was not the pedantic type, not the kind of person to commit to memory rules and subdivisions and parens and the first names of court clerks. And yet it was with zeal that I devoured the rules of the road: old cobwebby statutes from my grandfather’s legislature. I read every piece of literature at the local driving school, arrived on time and left late, and did everything according to the strictest adherence to the instructor’s pedagogy. I was a happy little humbugging drudge of the right of way. This caution and prudence carried over into my adult life, and I was honked at not infrequently for such conduct as traveling at the posted speed and stopping at octagonal signs. Perhaps you have honked at me. I don’t hate you for it. I’m a safe driver, and care for my life more than capturing an extra minute on the expressway. Pray, you are uncommon dangerous about the roadways Mr. Thompson. Yes, you (only a little quieter now. It is late.).
March 20-million in the year of your Lord, who is not at all bored these days, 1961. The exact date upon which the flame of my life was gifted with a surge of fatal water, or, if you don’t care for the allusion, the day I died, and passed out of this world in a heap – but it’s less interesting if I conclude before the rise of the sea, what you will now call climax. I was traveling to work. The course of travel was linear: several blocks along Pascal Street, a left (northbound) on Washington (the apple, sir, not George), from there two blocks north to Harper Way (it was whimsy that bade me pick that name), and onward into the little asphalt parking lot with striped corals for the painted metal works on wheels that arrived at 7:45 a.m. The sun was out, the day was bright. It was summer if that should please you. Pascal Street was home to traffic semaphores by the block. It could either be a slow or fast progress to work depending on the fancies of Fate in her spell over the green, yellow and red lights that ticked, ticked, ticked. Try my tongue. There’s a good pet.
I was approaching a green light hanging in the still air at the intersection of Pascal and 26th St. S. The light turned yellow and I stopped short. It would have been both practical and legal for my approach through the intersection, but I was a judicious driver. When the light turned green, I accelerated through the intersection with all the caution of a nun in the land of Blank, creeping along and measuring my speed. A Chevrolet pickup truck (late model) with a driver impaired by a bottle of gin smashed into my driver’s side and extinguished the candle of my existence instantly. And you might ask, how came you, dear writer, to write? I ask only of you, reader, why you require an unbroken universe. Is it because you can’t fathom a bag of bones fidgeting all the way down here?