Tartar Sauce

So… yeah.

Having kids has afforded me the luxury of watching children’s television shows without having to explain myself. I love SpongeBob SquarePants. Because I have kids, I try not to curse. SpongeBob has the greatest words to use instead of cursing, so I always try to grab a few out of his dictionary. Words like “Fish paste!” and “Barnacles!” and “Tartar sauce!”

I had me a Tartar sauce moment, y’all.

When I was younger, my grandfather used to drive me to and from school, grades 6-12. Maybe younger (I’m a little foggy). My grandfather was the type of man who didn’t bite his tongue – he said what he meant, meant what he said. He was also a man who hadn’t learned how to drive until his 60’s. If you asked him, he’d tell you he didn’t need to because the 32-window job could take him everywhere he needed to go.

(The 32-window job, for those who don’t know, is a bus. Yeah, I didn’t know that one either.)

Every ounce of frustration he should have released the years he’d neglected getting a licence had over 40-plus years to simmer and burn. Oh, boy, did it burn. When it was my turn to learn to drive, my grouchy, fiesty grandfather let me have it. Who cared that I was a girl growing to be a woman. No soft passes lobbed here. Only hard balls. Sink or swim. Countless times I’d ask him to give me a break. “You get your break on Broadway,” was his reply.

And he meant it, too.

My grandfather was a man of many sayings. Not really proverbs, but quotes that hit your ribs like meatloaf. Some thirty years later and I’m still quoting them.

During his hay day of driving (what was that, 70?), he made it known that women drivers ranked right up there with getting a root canal in his book. They couldn’t drive. They couldn’t see. They couldn’t make a left. They couldn’t merge lanes. They drove too slow on the highways. They couldn’t do anything right. “This is a man’s world,” he’d quote James Brown. When I’d finish his quote with the rest of the song, “…but it wouldn’t be nuthin’ without a woman or a girl,” well, I’d may as well have dropped acid down his pants. “If women can drive,” he’d say, “I can make a watch with a hammer.” Needless to say, my grandfather spent the better part of my formative pre-driving years shellacking this into my brain, all the time making sure I wouldn’t turn into one of those women drivers he was always ranting about. He wanted his then 16-year-old granddaughter to drive like a man.



And I do.

Well… I DID.

This was my fault. A bus, a trolly, and two minivan cabs parked in front of the parking lot entrance of my job, and it looked like I had enough room to squeeze my SUV right through the slit of space I was provided.



I’m not even joking when I tell you I heard my grandfather scream from heaven and throw his hands up in the air when I did this.