This month's "The Mirror" column was written by Susan Dalton © 2015, all rights reserved.
I rarely lose my temper. I'm calm, kind, reasonable, or so I like to believe. But
Gadi Shorr's May column about road rage made me think about an incident that happened almost twenty-five years ago, shortly after I began Aikido. My husband Kemp, five-year old son Ryan, and I were driving back from a lovely day at a lake near our town. Ryan sat in the back behind Kemp, probably listening to a Ninja Turtles story on tape, maybe drowsing a bit after a long day in the sun. I, in the passenger's seat, read a book, and Kemp drove. We were stopped in the left turn lane at a stoplight, getting ready to turn from a major road onto another major road, almost home. Suddenly the car jerked and my husband cursed. A truck had come roaring up to the light. Instead of slowing down behind us as the light changed and we began to move, he swung around us, passing us in the left turn lane, causing Kemp to have to slam on brakes. Kemp yelled something and stuck up his middle finger.
The truck was large and red with no plates. A toddler stood in the middle of the front seat between a woman and a red-faced giant of a man. Immediately the man slowed the truck to almost stopped and began swerving all over three lanes so we could not pass. He then jumped out of the truck and ran back toward our car, where he jerked my husband's door open. Kemp threw our car into reverse; the sudden movement made the door slam. Kemp, of course, hit the master lock button to secure all our doors. The enraged man drew back his fist and smashed it into the driver's side window, sending flying glass all over my husband and all over my son.
Now, there are a couple of facts you ought to know. My husband is blind in one eye and has endured repeated surgeries on that eye. Glass near his eyes frightens him and terrifies me. And my child sitting there in the back seat covered with glass shards, well, he was the first of my miracle children (the only one I had at this point in our lives), the one my doctors said I would never be able to carry to term, the one I stayed on strict bedrest with for six months, no pillow, allowed up for five minutes every other day to take a shower. Yes, I'm justifying, but I'm trying to get you to understand what happened next, although I'm not entirely sure I understand it myself.
"You SON OF A BITCH," I screamed as I jumped out of the car and advanced on the man. I don't know what else I screamed. All I knew was I was going to kill him. When I got my hands on him, he was going to be dead. He was huge, bigger than my mountain of a brother who stands 6'4", 260, but I didn't care. White hot rage engulfed my entire body, particularly my nonfunctioning brain. I was going to kill him, and if he killed me first, I was going to keep on killing him, too angry to know I was dead.
So the guy took off running back to his truck, hopped in, and roared away. I'd like to think he feared for his life, but most probably he had broken his hand when he smashed our car window and was now in tremendous pain. By then I was returning to my body and my rational mind, and I listened to my husband's demands that I get back in the car. Now his rage took over and we began chasing this truck through the city streets, going sixty, seventy miles an hour in a twenty five mph zone.
"We need to stop chasing him before that baby standing in the truck gets hurt," I said. I had crawled over the seat into the back to brush the glass off of Ryan, who was fine. Our window had been made of safety glass, so although it broke into pieces, those pieces had no sharp edges. "We need to stop and be sure you're OK. We need to report this jerk to the police." I kept talking and my husband ‘s good sense returned, just as mine eventually had. His foot eased a bit off the accelerator. Finally, I said, "What are we going to do if we catch him? What if he has a weapon in the truck?"
Driving even more out of control than when we'd first encountered him, the guy in the truck put distance between him and us. We stopped at a red light and watched as he roared through the next red light blocks away. "Let's turn here and go to the police station," I said, and Kemp agreed.
At the station, the officer told us that the last incident of road rage she responded to had ended in a fatality. Someone was dead, and someone else was in prison. Ryan told her that when he grew up, he was going to be president and the first law he was going to make was that no one could ever give anyone the finger again. He also made sure to tell the officer all the bad words I said.
I think of Toyoda Fumio Shihan laughing at a seminar as he talked about yes, we can keep our centers on the mat. But what about in traffic when someone cuts us off? Can we do aikido then?
Hopefully my years of training mean I would respond differently today. I had never experienced this level of anger before, a rage so intense that I lost my center, my judgment, my mind. I had never before realized I was capable of murder. Hopefully I would now think of that baby standing in the truck throughout the incident rather than as an afterthought. Wherever that child is today, I hope he's OK. And of course I now realize something was already going on with the man in the truck long before he ran into us. Wherever he is, I hope he's OK, too --although when it rains, I hope a twinge in his hand reminds him not to be a jackass.
"The Mirror" is written by a roster of women who describe themselves as a disparate bunch of scientists, healers, artists, teachers, and, yes, writers. Over ten years into this collaboration we find we are a bunch of middle-aged yudansha from various parts of the world and styles of aikido. What we share is a lively curiosity about and love for both life and budo, and an inveterate tendency to write about our explorations.