It’s raining in East Tennessee today. It’s a Goldilocks kind of rain. Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right. That’s no surprise. It happens frequently this time of year. That is part of the wonder of Autumn. It rains and that knocks the leaves off the trees leaving a natural carpet on the roads with shades of yellow, orange, red and gold. It is quite lovely and very dangerous if you’re riding a motorcycle on it.
Leaves are not the important thing here. It’s the rain. In addition to bringing leaves down, it washes away the dust on ground. It cleans the air of pollutants and pollen. It also washes away I.Q. points of people in cars. Seriously, people! Use a little common sense. I have a commercial driver’s license (CDL) so I am careful to watch others on the road. When it’s raining, don’t most people know that the road is slick? Splashing through puddles is fun if you’re a kid trying to get your parents wet and laughing hysterically at the water going everywhere. It’s not so smart if you are in a hot little car that has no real clearance. I saw this one kid (I use that word on purpose because he really didn’t look old enough to see over the wheel) drive his hotrod through a large puddle sending water everywhere. By everywhere I mean all around him and up into the engine compartment where it drowned the motor. He was sitting there trying to get it started as I passed by. I would have stopped to help but I was laughing too hard to be much use.
A kid doing something stupid is expected. We all did stupid things when we were young. Didn’t you ever do something stupid when you were a teenager? No? You LIE!!!! Of course you did. I know I did. I got in trouble for hot rodding the Honda Civic my parents bought me. I wore out the retreads on it and my dad was convinced I was hot rodding it. Never mind all the 30 mile trips I made two nights a week to the community college to take a college computer course while still in high school. Oh no. That couldn’t be it. I must have been hot rodding a 1978 HONDA CIVIC HATCHBACK! Do you know how hard it is to hot rod a Honda Civic? Me neither because it’s im-freaking-possible! That didn’t stop my dad from tuning down the car with a motorcycle carburetor. Yes, it can be done. After he put that on, the Civic would go from 0 to 60 in 5.3 MINUTES. If you had a headwind, forget about speed. It would slow down to 35 on the highway when the wind picked up. But I did get forty miles to the gallon.
Anyway, rain also robs supposedly adult individuals of their common sense, too. Why don’t people stop and think before running through that yellow light at a hundred and two miles per hour on a slick road with rain limiting visibility in a school zone? That may be a slight exaggeration. I’m sure that lady wasn’t doing more than one hundred and one in that school zone. Then she slammed on her brakes and skidded until she was right on my bumper. I could see in my mirror that she was yelling and cussing at me because I had the nerve to stop and not run into the school bus in front of me which was picking up some kids. I can be really inconsiderate like that.
Sometimes I think we all need to take a step back and look at the rain. It waters the land; fills the lakes, rivers and stream; and gives us all the chance to drive like maniacs who have been given a day pass out of Arkham Asylum. Just remember, some of us want to get home in one piece.