Morning Klaxon

It’s still cold enough that I drive to the train station most mornings, and today I honked loudly at a pedestrian. But it was for her own good. Near the station, the road heads southward next to Flyers Stadium and toward the vast commuter arking lot. As I entered this section of road, I noticed a young slip of a woman stepping off the curb without a glance at oncoming traffic. I thought she would stop, and take a look, but she wandered further into the street, crossing diagonally, and at a fairly leisurely pace. She was talking on a cell phone.

I was the lead car in a small pack headed her way. Since I was paying close attention, there was no danger I was going to hit her. Still, I braked a bit and attracted her attention with a loud horn blast. I thought of it as a moment of traffic safety education for the lass, seeing as how she might be deficient in that skill. Startled, she retreated to the curb.

Had she not been so lucky, and found herself in front of someone distracted, say, by changing the radio, the grim irony would have been that at that point, there’s no need to cross the road at all. The sidewalk she was leaving goes straight to the train station, and I know that’s where she was going, since I later saw her on the platform. She may have taken the lesson to heart, or she might have told co-workers later, “Some jerk almost ran over me!”