Driving at My Age

1:00 p.m.

I'm sitting in a room in Pittsburgh waiting for Joyce to emerge from a meeting. We drove over here late this morning, leaving Hudson about 10, arriving at the site (downtown) about noon. Not bad.

I wouldn't say "smooth sailing," though, for--surprise! surprise!--there was a bit of roadwork along the way (Ohio Turnpike, Pa. Turnpike, etc.), and we got a nice surprise about two miles from our exit when the GPS voice went silent because we were receiving a robo-call at the moment. I took that well.

Not.

But we got here with only one wrong turn--an error we were able to remedy very easily, thanks to a kindly parking garage attendant. (Yes, we'd pulled into the wrong garage.)

Out on the Interstates, we saw the usual assortment of trucks going way faster than they did when I was younger, of car drivers who believe those posted speed limits are for fools--certainly not for them! Other drivers who seem unaware that their vehicles came equipped with turn signals.

Everything just seems so much ... faster ... to me now. When I was younger, I never thought at all about hopping on a freeway ... PAUSE ... why do we say "hopping on a freeway"? There is absolutely no "hopping" involved ... UNPAUSE ... and driving hundreds of miles. Once--before I was married--I drove from Des Moines, Iowa (where I'd been visiting my parents), to Lander, Wyoming, where I met up with my former college roommate, Charlie Rodgers. Google Maps tells me that's 898 miles. I did it without stopping except for gas, food, and ... you know. No biggie.

Pittsburgh is only a little over one hundred miles from our house--but, as I said, everything on the road now just seems more frantic, more impatient, more ... insane? I think I need to find a series of little county highways that can get me places now--though, of course, it would take me all day to accomplish it.

But I've learned: Interstate driving today ain't for the faint of heart, the tentative, the cautious, the law-abiding. For, in other words, that old guy in the black Prius who insists on going the speed limit--or slightly above.