Robert B. Simpson: Bittersweet associations
Dimon Kendrick-Holmes' column in last Saturday's Ledger brought back memories. I never took a road trip in an aging Lincoln the way he described it, but I did take one in a Cadillac that had one bad habit if you hadn't taken proper care of it. And I did learn the danger on that trip of snacking on sweets while driving.
I'd realized a long-time dream upon returning from Vietnam in 1968 and had bought a new Cadillac. It ran, rode, and drove beautifully. But it was now four years old, and I had long since learned that if the front end got knocked out of alignment, the car would nag you to death with its tendency to meander back and forth on the road, requiring nearly constant tiny steering corrections. And it was definitely past due for an alignment now.
I was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, and as with most troop units, we kept busy. I knew the car needed to go into the shop, but there had been no time to get it done. Now my wife and infant daughter and I were leaving at the end of a full duty day for a short vacation back here in Columbus. The car was packed and the baby was sleeping in a flimsy travel bed affair that was hung behind the front seat backs in what we ignorantly but typically during those years thought was a safe manner. We headed south. We'd be driving almost entirely at night and would get in really late. But we both could enjoy looking forward to relatives exclaiming over our daughter, and I could look forward to getting the car worked on at a shop in Columbus.
In my previous many years of bachelorhood and Army life, I had often driven long distances at night, taking advantage of a quirk in the Army's leave policy to get maximum free time by signing out one minute after midnight. By driving during the sleepiest time of the night, I vastly increased the risks, but what can I say? I was young. I would fight drowsiness with everything from singing loudly to turning wing vents to blow air in my face while I slapped myself. But eating worked best, and chocolate chip cookies worked best of all.
As I drove far into the night, conversation slackened. The baby slept peacefully, the radio played softly, and my drowsiness grew. I could not very well sing loudly, both for fear of waking the baby and because my wife would not have appreciated it. Nor would she have appreciated the whoosh of outside air from a wing vent. But I was prepared. I opened a large bag of chocolate chip cookies and set it on the transmission hump, leaning it back against the front seat.
Sometime just after midnight and just south of Manchester, Georgia, I reached again for a cookie, simultaneously pulling the car back from the center line it threatened to cross and making as much room as I could on the two-lane road for the driver coming up behind me to pass. Just as I stuffed half the next cookie into my mouth, the whole bag slid off the transmission hump and threatened to spill in the floor. As I grabbed for the bag, I noticed that the car behind me was not passing. In fact, he'd come close up behind me and turned a large, flashing blue light on. I pulled over, gulped the other half of the cookie, and got out to meet two law enforcement officers at my rear bumper. (That was acceptable then, before I learned to just put my hands on the steering wheel and sit still.)
The elder of the two men looked at my license and then told me that I'd been wandering over the road noticeably, even crossing the center line a few times.
"I was eating a cookie," I explained, forgetting to mention the alignment problem.
The man stared at me for a long moment. He asked if I'd had anything to drink and where I was going. Apparently my answers satisfied him.
"Sir, you need to stop as soon as you can and get some sleep," he said, and motioned me back into my car. I drove away, no longer in the mood to snack while driving. I was just glad to have been let go without a ticket for driving under the influence of cookies.
Robert B. Simpson, a 28-year Infantry veteran who retired as a colonel at Fort Benning, is the author of "Through the Dark Waters: Searching for Hope and Courage."
This story was originally published October 17, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Robert B. Simpson: Bittersweet associations ."