One in a row....

My family is attending a wedding this coming weekend, so Nathan and I went to get our hair cut last Sunday afternoon. On our way to the barber, we stopped at the local park to drop some clothes in the donation box for a local charity. Nathan was watching the kids playing basketball and was rather surprised when we came to a screeching halt halfway through the lot.....and even more surprised when the Obliviot in the SUV pulled out of a parking place into the exact spot we would have been in if I hadn't stopped.

"How did you know to stop like that?" he asked.

At work I have been known to answer questions such as this one with the phrase "It's FM." This always leads to the second question: "What's FM?"

"What's FM? It's F*cking Magic, that's what it is."

I didn't feel like doing that to Nate at the moment, (not that I haven't done it in the past) so I explained how I knew to stop. "As we were driving up to his parking place, I noticed that his back up lights were on. That meant that his truck was in reverse. I looked at his head and saw that he wasn't looking in our direction. When his brake lights went out, I knew that he was probably going to back up without looking. I stopped because I didn't think he knew we were here. I made a bet with myself that he was an oblivious idiot (Obliviot).....it turns out that I was right."

This led to a lengthy discussion about situational awareness and color codes. We talked all the way to the barber shop, talked while we waited, continued talking while we had lunch at the Subway next door, and finally finished somewhere around the WallyWorld parking lot. I used several examples: the Obliviot in the parking lot, his sister dumping a bucket of ice water on him while he was in the shower, and finally, the parking lot altercation I was involved in last year.

By the time we were done we had made a game out of the yellow-orange-yellow transitions that are normal occurances in city driving. The real comprehension test will come the next time Kathy decides that he needs some ice water to go with his shampoo.

As my old man used to say, "The name of the game never changes. It's always 'Look around, Leroy."

_