The Co-op in my neighbourhood kindly provides several extra-wide parking stalls specially designed for mothers with children on board.
They are so enormously wide that even a bad driver should be able to park a FedEx truck and a Smart Car side-by-side in each of them.
Yet there she was, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on her cell phone and her minivan wedged at an almost incomprehensible angle.
A moment later, she nearly backed over an old man and the young lady pushing his cart as they exited the grocery store. Yet the cell phone never left the driver's ear.
I wondered what it was about the conversation that made it so important that it had to continue even while she was attempting to park her car in a high traffic area.
I also had to wonder which of her reckless driving habits the little boy strapped into the safety seat behind her was picking up during this surreal sequence of events.
Later that same day, a middle-aged plumber driving a company truck nearly rear-ended me as I sat -- signal on -- trying to turn left into the Southwood Public Library's back entrance.
He too was chatting on the cell phone as he came hurtling around the corner directly into my rear view mirror.
I wondered what he would say to his teenaged daughter if she was the one on the cell phone instead of him when the same thing happened.
People, it seems, just aren't getting the message about cell phones.
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Last year, an Australian study concluded that drivers using cell phones are four times as likely to be involved in injury accidents.
At the same time, a US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration noted a nearly 20% increase in drivers using cell phones over the previous year.
So who are these imbeciles talking to as they wander down the road from one near-death experience to the next? Are they talking to us?
I certainly hope not. In fact, the first question I ask everyone I call on a cell phone nowadays is: "Are you driving a car right now?"
Why the third degree? What business is it of mine what you are doing when I call you? Because I don't want what happened to Pastor John Aydelott last week to happen to me.
On Friday, Aydelott called his friend Gavin Coffee, of Lake Forest Park, near Seattle, Washington.
"Coffee," say news reports out of Seattle, "had taken the day off from work and was on his way to see his sons play at their soccer camp."
During the course of their brief conversation, Coffee fell into a line of traffic. He was almost certainly unaware that he was now travelling behind a truck carrying an unsecured load of metal shelving.
Sure enough, some of the load blew onto the highway and Coffee swerved to miss
it.
He was killed instantly when a Lincoln Town Car ploughed into the driver's side of his Honda Civic.
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Pastor Aydelott, of course, heard the whole thing happen through his handset.
"All of a sudden I heard Gavin say 'whoa' and then 'whoa' again," Aydelott told KOMO 1000 News in Seattle. "I heard the car spin out and the crashing."
"I was screaming his name over and over and over again, but no one was speaking," Aydelott said. "Gavin wasn't responding. I could then hear the people trying to rescue him -- the paramedics -- and it didn't sound good."
Of course, it's hard to know what might have happened (or not happened) if the cell phone had not been part of this deadly equation. I guess we'll never know if Coffee would have noticed the danger looming from the unsecured load in the truck ahead of him had he not been distracted by the phone.
But then again, I'm not sure that it really matters.
Unsecured loads. Aggressive drivers. Hidden driveways. Sudden turns and unexpected swerves into oncoming traffic. With or without cell phones, there are a million ways to die on our roads today. Most of them are beyond our control.
But by refusing to talk on the phone to anyone who is behind the wheel of a car, regardless of the circumstances, we can avoid suffering the emotional trauma that Pastor Aydelott must surely be suffering today.
© Brent Johner. Originally published in the Calgary Herald, April 2006. Reprint rights available.
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