In most couples, there’s an unwritten rule while driving. Usually, one person is the designated driver and the other is the designated passenger. And if the trip is of any considerable length (like for us, visiting our children and grandchild in Brooklyn) the designated passenger usually brings along reading material they’ve been dying to catch up on, and emails they haven’t yet responded to. Oops, there I go again, ending a sentence with a preposition. As Winston Churchill once said about that ridiculous rule; “That is precisely the type of poppycock up with which I shall not put.” But I digress. There’s another unwritten rule about driving. That is when said designated driver is forced to make a quick maneuver like braking or swerving to avoid a crash, said designated passenger is forced to look up from her/his reading material and chastise the designated driver. I’m not saying this ever happens in my family, but if perchance it did it would go something like this: driver is going along smoothly in left lane, keeping pace with the traffic, aware of vehicular activity in front and in the rear. Passenger is blissfully reading a recipe out loud for the driver to make for dinner next week. Suddenly some idiot hotshot driver in a Dodge Challenger (it’s always a Dodge Challenger, right?) cuts our heroic driver off, forcing him/her (I think those are our pronouns, but I’ll get back to you on that) to step on the brake, which in turn causes the following chain reaction: the driver hits the horn and lets loose with a volley of curses, which then causes the passenger to look up from his/her recipe and chastise the driver, which then causes the driver to say “Me????? What about him???? What’d ya want me to do, get into a crash????” If the following sounds familiar, welcome to our world. If you don’t think that sounds familiar, then either a)you are never in a car or b) you’re lying. In any case when John and I came up with this one, the dialogue practically wrote itself.

Our other effort this week, Happy Labor Day, required much less forethought and since it’s about to be Labor Day weekend, where we take a break from labor, we’re gonna sign off early and take a break. We’re done, except for the next 12 hours John has to spend rendering and eventually coloring this year’s Labor Day poster. Enjoy the last weekend of summer and we’ll see you again next week,

Andy and John