Safety First!

It poured all day Wednesday, and that night Tiffany walked in the door from work wearing our scooter rain gear. It's fairly unattractive stuff... a gigantic yellow waterproof jacket that zips up well over any collar you might have on and baggy charcoal-gray waterproof pants that bunch at the ankles and make a swish-swish noise when you walk. I'll tell you what, though, it works. After you've had to sit on a wet seat in a pair of jeans, splashing down without a care in latex feels fantastic.

The jacket is yellow the better to see us in the rain. When we first bought the scooter in Los Angeles, I made Tiffany wear a reflective vest whenever she rode it despite the fact that she passed her written and driving tests on the first try, something I did not do. I failed the written exam, missing the cut-off by one question and had to stand outside the DMV's office for 15 minutes before I was allowed to go back in and retake it. Tiffany thought this was hysterical. I did not. Besides an exam I had to take at the end of Confirmation class at church, it was the only test I'd ever failed.

A few minutes later, as it turned out, I failed another one--the driving exam. First, I scooted too slowly around a circle in the parking lot so that I lost my balance and had to extend my legs to catch myself from falling. Then, the former highway patrolman/instructor asked me where my clutch was.

"I don't have a clutch," I said smartly, knowing he was trying to trick me. "We don't have gears."

"Really?" he asked.

"No...?" I asked, trying to read his eyes for a double-trick question.

Silence.

"This thing?" I asked, pointing to a red button.

"You don't have a clutch," he said.

I bowed my head in shame.

Apparently, he liked me because he let me ride around the circle again, which I did without trouble, and he pretended that I hadn't changed my mind about the clutch under pressure.

So anyway, despite the fact that Tiffany was a natural-born scooter rider, I enforced the vest policy because I couldn't bear the thought of someone running her over because they hadn't seen her (or for any other reason, come to think of it). Then I wore the vest. It was my first solo scooter trip at night, and a car of teenagers pulled up beside me.

I smiled at them, thinking they were admiring how cute I was on our clutch-less scooter.

Then, they pointed and laughed.

"Look at that vest!" they howled, pulling away when the light changed.

When I got home, I stuffed the vest in the back of the closet.

"You don't have to wear that anymore," I told Tiffany.

At least the yellow jacket serves an important second function: keeping us dry. As for the rest, well, I leave it in God's hands. Hopefully he doesn't hold a grudge about that Confirmation test.