Stop signs

Our neighbourhood is a combination of four-way stop signs and two-way stop signs and old Jewish ladies whose husbands have passed navigating both in the reverie of what used to be their husband’s oversized Oldsmobile’s they can’t let go of.

These reveries sweep and are ranging taking full advantage of any streets that bend. Walking your small child to school on streets without sidewalks, be sure to keep to the grass.

The problem with a husband’s being dead is his not keeping up with the times. It makes him insecure not knowing about four-way stop signs and the protocol. So when his voice whispers through the ventilation and the windshield wipers and the ripped area of the ceiling over top the passenger seat, the lack of knowing makes him act a little bigger, “Mildred, for heaven’s sake it’s nothing,” he crackles into ears a little waxy and stuffed up from maybe a grandson said something different but it seemed too complicated, that kind of care, a lovely boy.

There was a time when there weren’t so many four-way stop signs, just free unfettered passage through the meeting place of the two streets. It wasn’t all gummed up.

I almost went through one this morning, a two-way stop sign, without waiting for a garbage truck to scoot by. I was thinking he was going to stop, that it was a four-way stop sign and was already starting up my car slowly rolling forward to go, for when he did.

The guy in the garbage truck was wearing orange coveralls. Well, not all orange, partly. He gave me a stern look for my corrected mistake, then when he could see my friendly waving contrition his brown eyes smiled.