The only time I ever got a speeding ticket
Truth can, indeed, be stranger than fiction.
I was 19 years old and had just gotten my driver’s license. Why not at sixteen? Well, I was in college when just having turned 17 and started living in a different state, and then I graduated at 18 and was still trying to figure out how to “adult” (as it’s called nowadays). I moved back home from Minnesota to Nevada.
My mother hired me a driving instructor through leaving an index card pinned up on her church’s billboard. The guy we found sat next to me in the passenger seat of our 1976 Chrysler Cordoba while eating oranges and saying, “For Jesus’s sake, don’t do that.” I was never sure what that was. Don’t go to the left? Don’t go slower? We tried to sort this out and I eventually learned some things about driving.
I was desperate to find friends once back in Nevada. I took on temp jobs, found some cool people, and joined a Medieval Celtic band as their sound engineer. (As many people would choose to do, I’m sure.)
One night after band practice I was driving home, singing loudly along to my cassette tape recording of our songs. It was after midnight. I was the only car on the road, Highway 50 from Carson City to Dayton. “The loneliest highway.”
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I did not notice the police car behind me for a long time. The noise of my stereo and my shouty vocals drowned the siren out.
And then there were two of them. I wondered if I was being followed, or maybe I was just in the way of an emergency they were pursuing? I guessed that maybe they were bored and nothing else was around.
I pulled over once there was no longer a deep ditch on the side. My instructor had warned me to never get into a ditch.
I danced out of the car wearing a pink gown, a cloak, no shoes, and covered in powdered sugar on my top half. (I’d brought decorated cookies to band practice, and finished eating them on the drive back. Only years later did I realize how sketchy this would look to law enforcement. I was rather naïve back then.)
I got yelled at to get back in the car and I produced my license and registration. I was cited for driving 40 miles per hour through the 25-, 35-, 45-, and 65-mile zones for 20 minutes.
I’ve now been all over the western states, living on California’s Central Coast, but usually I’m not the one driving. My guy Steve is excellent with all vehicles, and I (nicknamed Captain Slow), am content to enjoy being driven around while controlling the music selection. Let’s play Tom Petty’s “Running Down a Dream”.
