DISTRACTED DRIVING, & THINKING [R, 7-9-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Days of Pandemic Winter

DISTRACTED DRIVING, & THINKING   [R, 7-9-20]

[Okay, take note: It seemed good to reflect on distracted driving, because of Indiana’s new driving while phoning law. So that’s how I started. Then I got onto wedding planning, and bag phones, and I ended up throwing anti-glitter on all principals because of the actions of one. To make things worse, I felt I should add some sort of moral or helpful conclusion, so there’s a quite lame paragraph at the end. If, at the conclusion, you say, “Why in the world did I waste my time on this?” remember that you were warned.]

As of July 1, it became illegal to drive in Indiana while holding a cell phone. We’re catching up. We are the twenty-first state to have such a law.

The first time I encountered a car phone—as we called them, for that was the only place they were used, because they had to be plugged in to the “cigarette lighter”-- was when the Presbyterian girl from Michigan was planning her wedding for my town in Illinois, because her grandparents lived there. It had to be on a particular date, and that conflicted with the Presbyterian preacher’s vacation plans, so he asked me to fill in for him. I agreed. He was a friend. I knew he needed a vacation. And I thought it meant only that I would have to show up at the Presbyterian church one Saturday afternoon, for half an hour, and say the wedding ritual I knew by heart, and smile and pray and go home to watch baseball on TV.

I did not at all understand that it involved talking every day, for months, with a young woman, as she planned her wedding, on her car phone. I didn’t even know that car phones existed.

She was a sales woman for… I think it was farm herbicides. So, she explained to me, she had lots of time in her car as she drove from place to place, so she had invested in a car phone so she could have something to do while driving, like plan her wedding.

I was surprised. I thought driving was a thing in itself, not something you did to accompany your other pursuits.

Those conversations were never easy. It was a new technology. Her voice came and went, according to where the then infrequent phone cell towers were located, and there was much honking from other drivers, who did not understand that she needed the whole road as she checked her lists of things for me to do, since I was right on site and could negotiate more easily with organists, soloists, janitors, florists, etc.

We got a car phone ourselves, though, after we ended up in the ditch one night while driving thirty miles to attend a cancer support group. It was because I swerved to miss a 200 pound possum in the road. [That’s the way I saw it, and that’s the way I tell it.] We sat there, headlights on so someone would see us and stop to help, while car after car sped right by us. At least one good thing I got from the Presbyterian from Michigan was the awareness of car phones. Sitting there in that ditch, we decided we needed one.

There weren’t cell phones in those days, just car phones. They were in big bags. Must have weighed 20 pounds. Helen was commuting 50 miles round-trip in those days and so took it along in case she ended up in the ditch again.

Also, she had to take it into the school building with her, because the principal had taken all the phones out of the offices of the teachers. Seems that some of the teachers had been using the phones to place bets for Pete Rose, and talk long-distance with girlfriends, using the school phones so their wives wouldn’t find out about it, and so, rather than confronting the guilty parties and telling them to cut it out, he used the normal principal principle to solve a problem, punish everyone for the misdeeds of the few. Just as school shootings were ramping up, and teachers really needed a way to call for help.

It is okay to focus on the task at hand. Multitasking really doesn’t exist. It’s just multi distracting. Sometimes you have to try to do lots of things at one time, especially if you have little kids to deal with. But anytime we can, do that one thing. It’s better for the brain, and for the spirit.

John Robert McFarland

BTW, FYI: The time noted for when I post a column is on California time, since that is where blogspot is located. I get up early, but not THAT early!