When the Moron Is the Boss

On my bicycle commute I often name particularly discourteous drivers as “morons of the day.” Last week on the same afternoon, two drivers earned the award.

The second was a young woman on her phone who stopped beyond her stop sign while looking for oncoming traffic to her right first, rather than left, where I was hesitating and awaiting eye contact before swerving around her car nose.

(In the coming week I would develop the brilliant phrase for future driver’s ed courses: “Look left first, right?”)

And the first moron of the day? One of the administrators at my school.

Several years ago, before we moved to our current country home, I commuted along a major thoroughfare that this administrator also traveled. Back then she told me multiple times that she was glad I was a well-lit rider; she was paranoid about hitting me on her way to work. Then one day, too soon after I’d begun riding from our new house along back country roads with little traffic for her to miss me along the major thoroughfare, she happily told me that she would be moving that weekend and so wouldn’t have to worry about hitting me anymore.

I couldn’t help but chuckle when we realized that her new house was actually on my new route.

Anyway, this week I saw in my mirror a car approaching me; even so, when it zoomed around me over a gentle crest and in the face of an oncoming vehicle, I was startled and courted the grassy shoulder just briefly. At the same moment, I saw on the back of the car the large ugly sports decals and team spirit vanity license plate that that administrator obsesses about. She sped ahead, then turned in at her street.

“She probably had to go home and take care of her dog before running into town for a meeting she didn’t want to be late for,” I told my family that night, “because she passed me again a bit later. But that time she was stuck behind a slow-moving car.”

We discussed what I should say if she came to me at school to apologize; I decided on, “Yes, I was scared there for a minute.”

The next morning while I was on hall duty she approached with her head prominently ducked behind her clipboard.

“I know you don’t want to see me,” she said, and continued to “apologize profusely,” claiming that she felt terrible and “thought about it all evening” and “knew she wasn’t going to hit me–I would’ve hit the car coming toward me before doing that”–and she could see me in her backup video camera (so she knew I’d survived? I’m not sure what she meant by that). “I knew I wasn’t going to hit you.”

“Thank you for saying so,” I said. “I was scared there for a minute.”

“But I had to get home to feed Bob–he’s our dog,” she said, “because Butch (that’s her husband) wasn’t home and I had a meeting [in town].”

“Yes, I was scared there for a minute,” I said.