Slow Down…or Stop?
July 21, 2010
You’d like my Uncle Lou. He’s 87 years old, intelligent, funny, and one of the best storytellers I know. In another era, he’d probably have been a professional speaker.
He’s also the last surviving member of his generation in my family, since we lost both my mother and my aunt (Lou’s wife) in the last eight months. So naturally, I try to visit him whenever I can, an event that always brings a huge smile to his face.
As always, he shares stories of the old days when he and my father (his fraternal twin) used to get into all sorts of mischief growing up in the Bronx in the 1920s and 30s. Of course, I’ve heard most of these stories at one time or another, but it’s still enormous fun to hear them again, and, specifically, to hear him tell them.
This time, though, he shared a story I’d never heard before. It seems he had been pulled over for running a stop sign some time back in 1965. Okay, he didn’t actually run the stop sign, it was more like a “rolling stop.”
In any case, he got pulled over. The officer approached the car, and asked my uncle if he realized he had run the stop sign. My uncle responded, “But I did slow down…”
At this point, the officer pulled out his “billy club” and began rapidly hitting his other hand with it. As he did this, he said to my uncle, “Imagine that’s your head I’m hitting. Do you want me to slow down…or stop?”
My uncle got the message and got away with a warning.
Sometimes, like a stop sign on the road, life sends you signals. You can ignore them, you can slow down, or you can stop and really consider what these messages are telling you. You may not get in an accident or get pulled over, but ignoring these signs often cause dire consequences.
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