TRAFFIC CIRCLE OF DEATH

I was not thrilled to get the aged Mr. Ryan as my assigned driver’s ed teacher back in the mid-60’s. He’d been my dad’s high school track coach thirty years earlier and he kept calling me by my last name. He routinely yelled at me when I a) drove the car into a ditch, b) failed at all attempts to parallel park and c) jammed the clutch in and out at inappropriate times, stuttering my way down Main Street. Mr. Ryan agreed to pass me if I promised to never, ever again in my life attempt to drive a stick shift. I stuck to it, mostly. But here’s the thing. Mr. Ryan is long gone but there’s a new horror on the driving horizon: traffic circles. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against the circle, personally. I like the Advent wreath and the Olympic rings. (I like all rings, actually.) I like the Native American dreamcatcher. Heck, the characters in my cozy mystery series set in the Upper Peninsula belong to a knitting circle. Traffic circles may make sense in London or Shang hai or New Jersey, but there is no earthly excuse to build them in Michigan, a state made up of snow and grids. So when I visited my hometown of Ann Arbor and began schlepping back and forth to the hospital twice a day, I was dismayed to discover that my seven-mile trek included three traffic circles. THREE! (On a related note, my mom, who lives in Ann Arbor, says nobody likes the danged circles.) Anyway, these circles, or as they are apparently called “roundabouts” – and let me just say that giving them a quaint, carousel-like name does not make the more palatable – caused my blood pressure to rise and my invective level compete with the number of steps on my Fitbit. Six times a day. I wound up in an emergency care facility on Washtenaw Avenue where – I kid you not – they thought it was important to measure my weight. COME ON, Ann Arbor! For those of you unfamiliar with the dreaded traffic circle, let me just print the rules of the road that I found on a very interesting South African website: As you arrive at a large traffic circle, traffic coming from your right has right of way, regardless of how many cars there are. Wait until there is a gap in the traffic and then easy slowly into the circle. Watch out for other traffic in the circle and be aware that they may not be using their indicators.” Yeah. That’ll work. If The Lion King celebrates the Circle of Life, the roundabout symbolizes the Dante’s ninth circle of hell. I say let’s send it the way of the clutch. I’ll just add that I love Ann Arbor, anyway.

THEY'VE GOT MY NUMBER

You’d think we were a nation of spies with all our passcodes and usernames and unlisted cell phone numbers. I’ll admit that (even with tons of caffeine) my memory is somewhat impaired by my advanced years or maybe it’s just laziness. In any case, I can’t believe how hard it is to get ahold of someone. For one thing, as mentioned, cell phones are unlisted. For another, there’s no longer a phonebook with anything except commercial numbers in it. And then there’s the annoying practice of using words to remind you of an enterprise. Word-numbers like 206-647-8262, which translates to 206-Nirvana or 1-800-Got Junk. I always avoid calling letters but several weeks ago, looking for advice about my mom, I needed to contact a nurse’s help station at St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor and the number listed was a word. Something like 734-NURSESS. I dialed away, hoping I wouldn’t get an automated message and thinking about my questions and then, lo and behold, a person picked up the phone. A woman. “Hello,” she said, sounding as if she didn’t mean it. “Oh, hi,” I said, brightly. “I’m trying to find out whether my mom needs a biopsy in order to have radiation.” A brief pause. “Who is this?” I explained. Over explained. I was the daughter, calling from out of town, didn’t want to risk a lung collapse, blah, blah, blah. More silence and then “Who gave you this number?” By now I was wondering whether I’d accidentally called a Southeast Michigan branch of the CIA or some other secret agency. “Uh, I think it was Stacy Somebody. I think she’s a social worker.” “Huh,” the voice said, disapproval dripping from the single syllable. “That’s happened before. The number is only one digit off from ours.” “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, still thinking it was weird she hadn’t given me a department or a name. “Who did I call?” “The hospital morgue.” Let me go on to say her name was Mary and we chatted for a few minutes. I told her I was interested in morgues because of writing mystery stories and she told me she was interested in the Upper Peninsula. So we talked about snow and death for a few minutes and at the end of the conversation she invited me to drop in when I was in town. “Just to visit,” she added, hastily. “Not to stay.” In spite of the pleasant encounter, I still don’t like word phone numbers. But just for fun I tried to convert my number to a word and I came up with 703-SVU-OINK. If you call it, expect me to respond with a suspicious “Who is this?”