By Jim Hagarty
2006
Last week, an 82-year-old woman was slapped with a $156 ticket for taking too long to cross a street in Los Angeles.
Mayvis Coyle was shuffling across a busy road with her cane, but couldn’t make it to the other side before the light turned red. A motorcycle cop nabbed her and told her she was obstructing traffic before he wrote out the fine.
“I think it’s completely outrageous,” she said. “He treated me like a six-year-old.”
Newspapers reported Los Angeles police Sgt. Mike Zaboski as saying that police are cracking down on people who improperly cross streets because pedestrian accidents are above normal. But on the day in question, the light changed too quickly even for high school students to make it across without running. It went from green to red in 20 seconds.
Now, you might think I’m going to defend the old lady and say boo to the cop. But you’re wrong. One of the problems with this world, as I see it, is that it is not well-enough populated with stressed-out, strung-out, wound-up, fiddle-string-tight senior citizens. Too many of them are just too darned relaxed for the good of our society. Plainly put, they are holding the rest of us back.
I say, Mayvis, get your outraged butt in gear or get off the roads!
Seniors tend to dawdle, whether on foot or behind the wheel. They stop each other on sidewalks and chat, an annoying practice as those of us with important things to do have to try to get around them. They completely take up what few benches there are around, making them unavailable for those of us who need to park it for 30 seconds to scald our throats with hot takeout coffee.
Seniors just don’t get it. They don’t talk on cellphones while they walk or drive which just goes to show their complete inefficiency. They’re not plugged into MP3 players so they can listen to Guy Lombardo while they rock on their front porches. They don’t jog, for Pete’s sake, they don’t cross streets against “no walking” signals (except for that annoying tortoise rebel Mayvis) and they don’t drive their cars through red lights.
Imagine that! Seniors actually follow traffic signals, even speed limit signs, which shows how out of it they really are. They are stopping progress, keeping society back. More needs to be done about this than handing out $156 parking tickets.
We need new “sunset” laws that keep seniors off the streets and in their homes where they belong.
In a way, although I’m still halfway between second and third base in this big ball game of life, I can identify with Mayvis. I was walking across a main street in my hometown of Stratford the other day when I became aware of a big lighted digital clock counting down the seconds I had left to cross this wide roadway. I’m not a slouch (like poke-along Mayvis) but it kept me going to make it to the other side as the clock announced three, two, one… With 25 cars and trucks ready to pounce, what it actually felt like was that the clock was ticking down the number of seconds I had left to live.
I recently pulled out of a funeral home in London and, unfortunately, turned the wrong way onto the one-way King Street. Drivers immediately began flashing their lights but a young cop was all over me like drool on a baby. He actually yelled “cease and desist” and screamed at me for five minutes, leading me to believe I was heading for the U.S. prison on Guantanamo Bay or worse.
Between gritted teeth, I wanted to tell him I happily drove along King Street (the right way) dozens of times while he was still filling the diapers his mama put on him, but to avoid the $300 fine I was threatened with, I restrained myself. Mayvis got off lucky: I would have been happy to have been treated like a six-year-old rather than a diaperless infant.
A cab driver in New York was stopped at a light one day when an old lady hobbled in front of his car, trying to make it to the other side. She was too slow, however, and just when she was midway past his hood, the light changed. The driver behind the cabbie immediately got on his horn, commanding him to get moving. The cab driver got out of his vehicle, walked back to the car behind him, threw his keys in the window and said, “You run over her, bud! I haven’t got the stomach for it.”
It’s a speedy world we live in. Seniors, and all others so inclined, need to take to heart this motto: Move it or lose it!
One of these days, Mayvis and I might just lose it.
