Don’t Drink and Drive
I distinctly remember as a child, telling my mother she shouldn’t drink and drive.
This is my fuzzy recollection of the event: we were in her old Toyota Camry that was a horrid brown color. The way I’ve remembered it, I was sitting in the passenger seat, but I would have been too young at the time, so I was probably in the back. Mommy Dearest (who hates that nickname, but can’t think of a better one) took a drink while driving RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME! Of course I had to admonish her strongly. My cartoons were apparently liberaly sprinkled with “Don’t Drink and Drive” ads, and I had taken it to heart.
Mom had to explain they were refering to alcohol in those ads, not coffee, which she was drinking.
Thinking back now, I’m surprised she didn’t just bust out laughing at me. That would have been my automatic reaction. I did have my own logic about why drinking anything would be bad. I was young enough, maybe 5 or so, that I didn’t know that alcohol impaired you in any way. My Mom was always drinking alcohol constantly, and seemed pretty functional. I’m kidding, of course. (Dad used to say “There’s Mom, drunk as usual”, when reading children’s stories to us. He would just point to pictures and say ridiculous things, like Ankylosaurus has a whip-like tail. I think he got bored of reading the same dinosaur book repeatedly, and had to find ways to amuse himself.)
My thought process was this: you’re driving your car, watching the road. You look down to get your coffee cup. Assuming terrible screaming death doesn’t attack you in the 2 seconds that process takes, you will now take a drink of your beverage. This will obviously impede your line of sight, thus leading to imminent horrible burning death carnage. Makes sense, right? I have always been logical to a fault. We’ll see if Mom comments about this. Hopefully she remembers it better than I do.
