Talking last night at work about how the time of day we drive home is when police are watching every car for that little indication a driver is drunk, the wavering in a lane, failure to dim lights, turn signal staying on forever, driving too slowly. We also came up with the idea that for us, most likely the same police officers are on duty every night and they might get to recognize our cars and after a while realize we are commuters and are regulars going home from work, so probably not drunk.
So, with that in mind: while driving home last night I had a battle with a piece of gum. Nicotine gum might just have saved my life. I quit smoking Jan. 10, 2004, but since have chewed the gum regularly. Every once in a while, I get a piece that seems softer than usual and those pieces tend to stick to teeth and almost anything else they touch. Such a piece exposed itself last night during the journey. I first noticed it when it clung to my teeth. Pretty soon it was stuck and stretching between upper and lower teeth and threatening to cement my mouth closed. It took forever digging to extract it from my mouth and it came out with long strings still attached to teeth. With some finger digging, I finally removed the whole piece, but then it was stuck to my fingers.
I kept rolling it between my thumb in forefinger trying to get a hard ball that I could dispose of but it wouldn’t harden. I finally produced something symmetrical and lowered the window but when I threw it, the gum adhered to my fingers. With several more rolls and wrist snaps I finally flung it overboard, I thought. Minutes later with my hand at the top of the wheel I noticed a lump on my thumbnail and on closer inspection realized it was the ball of gum.
Here we go again. I tried to lift it off with my other hand but only part of it came with me. Now I had a string of gum connecting both hands and the more I tried to pull it off one, the more stuck to the other and pretty soon I had something of a spider web of nicotine gum connecting both hands and the strings only lengthened when I tried to pull my hands apart. Eventually of course, some stuck to the steering wheel and it was at that point I realized all the time I had been wrestling this gum I had been kind of weaving back and forth in my lane,
Now I was doing the very thing I had worried a policeman would pull me over for. I felt like Br’er Rabbit and the tar baby if anyone remembers that reference (It is one movie that will probably never come out of the fabled Disney vault). And how would you explain to a cop who thought you were driving drunk that it was all about a piece of gum? I slowed down, got the gum under as much control as I could and because I was only about a mile from my exit, drove on without fighting it any more, both hands at the top of the wheel as close together as possible to prevent the web from spreading any more. Once off the main highway I pulled over to the side, found my roll of paper towel and stepped out. It took several minutes to get all the gum off my hands and then the steering wheel and then the gearshift. With most of it gone, I thought, I went on down the blue highway, of course chewing a new piece of gum. Who knows if I got it all, I will probably still find some when I get in it to go to work today. I know there was still some gum and paper towel on my fingers when I got home.
On the way, I passed three police cars stopped with their lights flashing. In their headlights I saw they had a woman standing and she had been handcuffed. I wanted to shout “blame it on the gum,” but chose the wiser course and went on home.
No comments:
Post a Comment