A klaxon blared in the sun-dappled parking lot of a suburban library one recent morning.
A tiny, frail old woman was pulling very carefully into a handicapped parking space. She was not moving fast enough to satisfy the beefy man in the car behind her who evidently wanted to get a parking space of his own. So as she inched her car cautiously forward, the man leaned on his horn. His face was distorted by rage at being kept waiting, oh, perhaps 15 seconds.
“Wow,” thought a friend of mine, who walked past the scene on her way into the building, “he must really have some overdue books.”
By the time the old woman tottered into the library with the help of a cane, the wrathful man had parked, gone in, found whatever it was he wanted and taken his place in the line to check out books.
Unfortunately, this meant she had to pass right in front of him in order to get to the bookshelves. My friend was in the line and saw what happened.
“Oh,” the old woman said with gentle recognition. “You’re the man who was in such a hurry.”
“Yes,” he said loudly, pushing past her to get to the counter, “and you’re HOLDING ME UP!”
The tiny woman blinked unhappily. “Oh dear,” she said. She resumed making her unsteady way toward the back of the library.
My friend felt a surge of adrenaline. Should she say something to this guy? She felt like meeting anger with anger. She wanted to tell him that he ought to be ashamed of himself, talking to an old lady like that. She wanted to ask if his mother had raised him to talk to women that way. She wanted to tell him she hoped that when he was old people would honk their horns at him and he’d see how he liked it. She wanted to kick him in the shins.
But while she was thinking of all the things she wanted say to him — not counting the shins — the big, angry man finished his business at the library and strode out. My friend was left standing in line, feeling cowardly.
Was she a coward? Should she have intervened? As bystanders in other people’s dramatic incidents, we surely have some responsibility. I think my friend would have been justified if she’d blasted the guy.
The truth is, probably only a calm, kind intervention would have had a chance of succeeding with such an irate man — “Excuse me, you seem to be having a rotten day, but I do hope you would be more considerate of the elderly in the future. I’m sure you see now that she was moving as fast as she could” — and unfortunately by the time the outraged bystander’s blood had cooled he was gone.
In the end, my friend reckoned she could at least cheer up the target of his ire. She found the old woman seated at a round table, reading the newspaper. My friend approached and crouched down in a friendly way.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” she said, “Are you the person to whom that man was so rude?”
“Why yes, dear,” replied the old woman (“Just as you’d want a lovely little old lady to speak!” my friend told me later).
“I just wanted to say that I’m glad you held your temper, because not everyone would.”
“Thank you, dear.”
“I didn’t do much,” my friend thought, as she left, “but at least I did something.”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
