By JACK GODBEY

Contributing Columnist

I can remember when I turned 16-years-old. There was nothing more dominant in my world, at that time, than getting my driver’s license. That little plastic license represented total freedom and I felt like the entire world would open up to me if I could just obtain it. I can also remember my Father taking me out on the open road to test my skills and how overwhelming it all seemed

to be. The cars buzzed back and forth and blew their exhaust in my face as I hugged the right lane and gripped the steering wheel so hard there was no blood left in my fingers at all. Eventually, the fear subsided and I learned the rules of the road quickly, and I started to drive. I am often reminded of this time in my life when I go to the grocery store to shop. While there are many rules of the road that tell us how to react when driving our cars, when you grab your grocery cart and start to go up and down the aisles, there seems to be no rules whatsoever and I sometimes feel the same way I did back when I was learning to drive a car. Grocery carts are buzzing up and down with no rhyme or reason and I find myself once again putting the chokehold on the grocery cart handle trying not to be run over. Can you imagine if people drove their cars the same way that they drove their grocery cart? If they did then it might look something like this:

People would drive on whatever side of the road they felt like. Today I will drive on the right side and tomorrow I might drive on the left side, or just go side to side. If I see something across the road that I want to look at then we would stop our car in the middle of the road and get out, look at it and pay no mind to the other traffic around. If you don’t feel like driving your car today then let’s allow our toddler to drive. Sure, he may run into everything around him, but if you yell loud enough he will eventually figure it out. Once you are done driving your car, you would not bother pulling into a driveway, or parking space. You would just abandon it in the middle of the parking lot for the rest of us to dodge. Of course, my all-time favorite, if you are driving down the road and see a friend or family member that you have not seen in a while, then both of you would stop your cars right in the middle of the road and catch up on the gossip. The rest of us will wait until you are done. If you are traveling down a side road and come to the main highway, then you would keep right on trucking and would not stop to look if anything is coming before you pull out. It does not help any that sometimes they will build giant displays in the middle of the road, so that only one car may pass at a time and of course, let’s do that on the busiest highway there is.

I think we can tell a lot about a person’s driving skills by the way they operate the grocery cart and if that is the case then we all may be in trouble.

Jack Godbey is a resident of Danville. He is a published author and historian.