Antique & Classic Cars Blog

When other people do dumb stuff at the wheel, we point it out on this site.

So, in the spirit of fairness, when I have done something dumb, it’s time to ’fess up. Two nights ago, I was heading east on 38th street going to help a friend pull an old refrigerator out of his basement. On the way, my wife called me. I took the call pulling up to the intersection of 38th and Hiawatha.

Yes, the light rail passes right through there. Because I was distracted on the phone, I stopped a reasonable distance from the traffic light but not before the pivoting warning arm for the train.

Ding, Ding, Ding went the warning bell, which took a second for me to process because, as Pee-Wee Herman puts it in Big Adventure, I was “trying to use the phone!”

A long bar to stop jabbering nincompoops starts coming down on top of my car (luckily, depending on how you look at it, I was in my wife’s Golf and not my classic MG). This bar settles on the top of the car about the time the fact that the train was soon coming settled on my distracted brain.

Fortunately–again depending on how you look at it–John Law was sitting at a red light on Hiawatha at the same intersection. He flicked on his spotlight and shined it in my windshield with a pretty clear meaning: Hey idiot, the train’s coming.

“Uh, honey, I gotta go.”

I threw it in reverse and backed up a few feet. Fortunately the guy behind me had left a little room. As soon as I was back where I was supposed to be, the officer shut off his light and roared off, no doubt annoyed he’d had to deal with that low-IQ situation on the way to some genuine law enforcement priority.

My car was not on the tracks—yet sitting near them with a warning hazard blinking in one window, a patrolman’s spotlight shining in your eyes and a large, reflective-striped barrier plunked down on top of your wife’s car is no way to demonstrate the moral high ground.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2008 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.