OF A GOLDEN AGE

My beloved late grandfather had more wonderful qualities than can be listed. I miss him and think of him every day.

That said, his driving skills did not age very well, reaching a nadir when one day he sailed off the side of a curve in the road on a foggy day. Luckily the road was rural and he was fine, if rattled, and it was a blessedly low-impact way to learn that he was not in the greatest driving condition. I hadn’t ridden in the car with him for at least a few years at that point, and we often went places all together as a family so my mom or dad would drive.

Here in the city, there are many, many, many dangerous elderly drivers who are guilty of something my great aunt Gertrude did as she entered her 90s: they slow way down and hesitate to do everything. This was fine for Gertrude, at least for a while, in our town of 4,000 for a half-mile trip. But if you’ve driven in Chicago you realize how dangerous this is, as everyone’s driving patterns fit into a careful (careless) stand of dominoes.

There are people who are very Zen and shruggy about driving — “I’ll get there when I get there” and all of that — but Chicagoans aren’t those people and I, along with the rest, am not one of those people. If other drivers are confidently going exactly the speed limit or being cautious and defensive, I totally respect that; I go a reasonable speed at all times and am vigilant, too. But the hesitation and slowness of some drivers is different. This New Old Age post offers some evidence of these behaviors. I’d wager that the threshold for what constitutes a “critical error” (in the post, defined as one which will cause an accident) is much lower in the city.

I believe these older drivers who slow down and hesitate are undermined by their own fear, of making the wrong choice, of having their privileges revoked, of being pressed to admit that their faculties have changed with age. Unfortunately, more than a reasonable amount of fear is paralytic to drivers of any age or experience level, and I see frightened drivers creating chaos everywhere every day.

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