Pride goeth before a Don’t Walk sign
When I was just a little boy my folks took me to New York. I still have a clear memory of the dizzying view down from the top of the Empire State Building towards the streets where citizens bustled like ants about the nest before a storm. I let my parents know I did not want to be held up against the window. Glass breaks. I knew that. View schmiew.
Later that day, in an unrelated incident, my progenitors got away from me outside Macy’s. I knew they were heading for a church and I’d never been anywhere there was more than one of those so I set out to find them.
Back then cars were all big gas guzzlers with grilles like chrome toothed bears. There were new-fangled pedestrian lights that I could read. WALK glowed in green as I crossed the growling rows of crouching heavy metal beasts. DON’T WALK. – angry red change of light. What can a poor boy do?
I don’t want to look like I can’t read. I can. And it says don’t walk. But I’m not even half way across. So I should go back. Maybe I should run.
On my safe return to the kerb a cop approached.
‘You lorst, kid?’
Of course not, I assured him, and asked for directions to the White Street Episcopalian Church. A crowd had massed about me, as it must in the Naked City.
This conscientious representative of New York’s finest still seemed concerned: ‘Where you frahm?’
‘Australia.’
‘Australia! I know where dat is!’ honked a helpful voice from the back.
About then my abashed mother and father retrieved me from the eye of this brainstorm.
Since that day I have been a keen student of traffic. I secured a scholarship to Queen’s College, Melbourne, with some verse about the inane caterpillars of cars that idle in the city’s canyons.
And still I wonder when we will wake from our modern nightmare of motored metal monsters.
Get on your bikes.
by Peter Whitehead
