I was born and raised in a big city.  Though Mesa is certainly no NYC [Scottsdale comes close], there are people galore, immigrants of all ethnicities, and a multitude of shopping malls.  With the dense population (approximately 460,155 [that’s not counting the many cities abutting my own, which, combined, make up “The Greater Phoenix Area,” otherwise known as”The Valley of the Sun.”  If I were to include all those, the number would be more like 4,579,427 {numbers according to Wikipedia–what else?}]), another factor my city (and surrounding area) can boast is a fantastic network of freeways.  The infrastructure is a grid-like web of wide rows, shredded tennis-ball street tops, and seven–sometimes eight–lanes each way…

I learned to drive on these freeways.  I thrive to drive on these streets.

Image from here.

Enter Canada.  Canada, the country whose entire population (estimated 33,440,007) rivals that of…the State of California (36,457,549).

A typical freeway near my house would not be called a freeway at all, but a highway, and could look something like this:

Image from here.

Rural Alberta (which is redundant, really, because there are only two areas of Alberta which are not rural), bless its heart, just doesn’t produce the sort of cutthroat, in-your-face, outta-my-way sort of drivers I’m used to going up against.  Instead, it produces…dare I say…

…pansies?

I dared.  {Let’s do keep in mind this is excluding all the farm kids who grew up racing through fields in the old pickup to get to the next cattle birthing faster ‘n a shotgun could kill a sleeping grizzly.  Those guys are crazy; the drivers I’m talking about are the average rural Albertan mom and dad, teenager, or grandpa.}

It is perfectly safe to say that nine times out of ten, when I leave my house, I get stuck behind a driver who considers it prudent to drive 10 kilometres below the speed limit–and that’s not even after a snow fall!

In Mesa, when there’s an idiot on the road (idiot=any person who does not exceed the speed limit by at least five miles per hour {preferably 10}), a typical reaction from a normal driver would be to wait for a gap, swerve to pass on the left (inasmuch as there are always two lanes {even if we have to make our own}), and give the numskull a vicious glare as he or she speeds on past, wasting a gallon of well-spent fuel accelerating to make up for time lost behind the fool.  A driver feeling particularly aggressive might take the opportunity to use the horn, though horn beeps in Phoenix are not nearly as prevalent as back east, I’m told.

In Mayberry, however (population equal to that of my sophomore class in high school {grade 10, Canadians}), I pull the same sort of stunt, passing some errant fool driving 20 kilometres in a 50 kilometre zone, and turn to glare seethingly at the idiot I’ve passed…

…and it turns out to be my sweet, gracious neighbor from across the street who’s invited us to dinner on Sunday.  Or the bishop of my church congregation.  Or my father-in-law.

And he’s not really someone I want to cross.

And that’s just embarrassing. I think my real vexation with this place is less about the pokey drivers, and more about the lack of anonymity. I can’t flip people off in this town, because they all know who I am, even if I’ve never seen ’em before.  I can’t tailgate someone who’s driving like a granny, because there’s a very real chance that it is someone’s granny, and word will get out.

I can’t buy lingerie (even if I wanted to {which I don’t}) at the closest mall, because the salesgirl there used to date Poor Kyle, and then she’ll know my measurements and go home and brag to all her friends that she’s eight sizes smaller than me.

Who knows?  Maybe the real problem is all the cookies I’ve been eating.

But I’m blaming it on the drivers.

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