My sister's long-term boyfriend, you know? The cool one. Was going
off for the summer to do something unspeakably cool. He and his
friends were riding a bus up to Montana to work as loggers or
firefighters or something else terribly manly for the summer and then
when they were done they were going to ride their mountain bikes all
the way home. Awesome right? My sister had been with him the night
before but he was leaving from a town twenty miles to the north early
in the morning and she got the bug to tell him goodbye at the bus
stop. She asked me to come with her and I thought that would be a fun
thing to do at 6 in the morning on a Saturday. The crux of the
problem was that he was going to leave in 10 minutes and we were
twenty miles to the South. Simple math will tell you we were going to
need to haul 'A' haul some serious 'A' indeed. We hopped in the car
like Bruce Wayne and his probably not pedophilic love interest, his
young ward Dick Grayson on their way to stop a crime that only
properly pajama-ed crime fighters could stop. We started going the
required 120 miles per hour required by the laws of physics to get us
to the point on time. I had never ridden in a car going at this
stupid rate of speed and I was not really enjoying it. At 120 every
bump and jostle is an adventure in existential terror. Thankfully,
just over halfway, the long arm of the law stopped to ask us just
what exactly the hell we were up to going twice the speed limit. My sister started crying half
because she was in deep trouble for he speeding transgression and
half because the love of her life was just about to get on a bus and
she was going to miss the last chance for a good-bye. This next part
is sexism at its ugliest point. When the officer saw she was so sad
and when he heard her excuse her let her off with a warning after
telling her that if he did give her the ticket she would loose her
license until she was an adult. I can only assume if I was crying
about missing a rendezvous with my boyfriend as my excuse for
speeding I would have been treated to a little stick-time and some
extra thorough application of the law. She died her eyes and drove
within the constraints of the law for the next six miles and still we
made it to the bus stop and her boyfriend before he was off for good.
It turned out she would only be without him for three weeks but that
is a story for another day.
