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The sound of a BlackBerry 8830 “World Edition” striking the inside of a Cadillac STS windshield at approximately fifty miles per hour is somewhere between a ‘clack’ and a solid ‘crack’. It was followed by a surprised yelp from my wife as she was momentarily suspended from her safety belt by the g-force of a full-ABS stop, having just lost her smartphone in mid-texting. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been time to warn her that we were about to test the Caddy’s 70-0 stopping ability on a twisting side road. Loafing along, chatting idly about this and that, I’d been almost inattentive to the view ahead – until I’d seen the flash of red coming around the blind corner towards us.

It was a kid, by which I mean a teenager. (When did I start using the word “kid” to refer to people old enough to drive? I suppose it was around the time I became old enough to potentially have a driving-age child of my own.) Young, wide-eyed, fighting for control of his late-Nineties Dodge Avenger R/T, sawing at the wheel to save a corner entry that was probably more than a bit too hot, he was just on his side of the double-yellow when he came into my field of vision. It looked like a solid head-on collision in the making, so I immediately left-footed the pearl-white STS to a halt with two wheels off in the ditch in the hopes he would save the car before he got to our position, or at least slow the thing down enough to keep us all out of the emergency room.

His corner exit was disastrous at best, but a slight change in road camber past the turn gave our rather terrified Avenger driver just enough grip to straighten the car out, and he coasted past us looking for all the world as if he’d lost his primary parachute and been saved by the backup. A few hundred feet down the road, I heard him pick up full throttle again and steam away from us with all the vigor the bespoilered old Mitsu-Dodge could muster up. Reaching up to the dashtop to retrieve her BlackBerry, my wife looked at me expectantly. You see, I’m a veritable firehose of criticism behind the wheel, offering my passengers a constant stream of observations regarding the idiocy, foolhardiness, timidity, yellow-light-early-braking, left-lane-banditry, and general despicability of my fellow motorists. Surely I’d have something to say?

“Good for him,” I smiled, and with that, we resumed our boring little trip to the hardware store.

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