Marci Purr my dear friend stopped by last week to tell me she was being shunned by the Jehovah's Witnesses for having a birthday party and was once again casting about for a faith. This was her fifth faith in five years if you don't count "The Secret" which isn't so much a religion as it is a DVD and a book.
So Marci stops by and I just blurted it out, even though the shame was overwhelming, I have to go to an anger management course. The judge is making me, that feline-a-phobic, power grabbing, ham-fisted adjudicator". Marci stopped short at the word adjudicator. It was last Tuesday's word of the day on my calendar, a gift from my sister who should have kept it for herself, considering she can't get her verb tenses to agree to save her life, but I digress.
It was a minor traffic altercation. My boyfriend, Tucker Wagtail called it classic "road rage". Sylvia Pooftail called it "your anger issue". What is she talking about? It was a momentary lapse in judgment. Stephen Covey one of the thought leaders of the universe has said, "We must learn to create a space between a stimulus and our response. It is this space where we can act out of maturity and reason rather than impulse or anger". What does he know, really. Personally I'm just going to fill that space with a little Valium or one of Tucker's Lortabs left over from when he got fixed.
I was late for my yoga class. Limberness has always been one of my goals, a governing value really. Yoga has provided me with the opportunity to stay centered and at peace with the world except on the days this one instructor leads whom I hate.
So there I was behind the wheel of my Chrysler Seabring, the top down and Simon and Garfunkel on the radio being a "rock" and an "island" at the same time and I was singing along and I sounded just like Brittany Spears. I turned left into the parking lot where I was blocked by two women, not in a Seabring convertible, but an old Ventura with a vinyl roof.
I honked to let them know I was behind them with the back of my car hanging out into oncoming traffic. Imagine the shock when instead of getting out of my way as they should have, they flipped me off, both of them, together. This is the part where I should have heeded Dr. Covey's advice, but three weeks earlier I had been cut off by an elderly women who didn't signal and I had just had it. I laid on the horn and plowed right into her tail lights. With only two feet initially separating us I wasn't able to get up much speed so there was really no damage, and I suppose I shouldn't have backed up and rammed them again, or the third time for that matter, but if you only understood the kind of day I'd had you would sympathize.
The passenger in the offending vehicle did come back and tell me they had stopped so she could open the trunk and get the wheelchair out for the driver. She was on her way to a doctor's appointment. Of course I didn't believe her. I'd heard that wheelchair scam, well actually never, but it sounded fishy. Anyway she still had time, so it wasn't like I made her miss that.
So I drove around her, parked and went to my class. When I came out of my yoga class my car had been towed which completely ruined the inner peace I had just spent 90 minutes achieving. The police threw around a lot of phrases like "hit and run", "leaving the scene", "assault." The details after this are boring so I won't go on, other than to say, lawyers, fines and insurance have cost me more than $1,200 which doesn't even begin to measure the emotional price I've paid just because I'm in the right.
Marci sometimes lent a sympathetic ear, but this time she just looked at me with that look of hers and said, "It sounds to me like you spent $1,200 on a temper tantrum. You should have called Gretchen".
Gretchen Knickers the Shetland pony who is the Relief Society President in the 12th Ward is going to law school at night. I think she's really looking for a career that will allow her to dump that plow horse she married, but I digress. Gretchen just laughed at the whole thing, or maybe she was neighing out the back window at her two daughters, it's so hard to tell the difference. She told me to pay the fine and move on, which is probably what I should have done. But I was right and I am not one to compromise my principles out of expediency or to conserve finances.
So now All State has raised my premiums by $81 every six months, and, well I just can't even begin to talk about the blow to my self esteem, I mean losing in court and everything. Anyone who knows me will tell you I will admit it when I'm wrong, which is hardly ever, and I will acknowledge I'm not perfect. But this just wasn't one of those times.
