Stop

"Mommy, why we stopping?" Josie asked.

In the past few weeks, I have rolled through stop signs and gunned it at yellow lights just so I could avoid this question.I leaned my head into the streering wheel and sighed.

"Josie, why do you think we are stopping?" I asked in the least hostile tone I could muster.

Josie leaned to her left and looked out through the windshield. "Red light," she said and went back to reading her book.

I have faint memories of feeling similar irritation when my mom was driving. I have a hazy recollection of sitting in the front seat and tapping my mom's arm anxiously saying, "it's green mom. it's green." completely irritated that she hadn't started moving the second the light changed. I mean, what else could she possibly have on her mind but getting me to where I needed to be as fast as humanly possible.

I have very, very, very clear memories of the one time I tapped my mom's arm and told her the light was green when it was actually still red. I thought it was going to be a funny practical joke. I thought wrong.

Fortunately my mom hit the breaks before we went very far into the intersection. Unfortunately, we were quite a ways from where we needed to be that day so my mom had plenty of time to explain to me why saying the light was green when it wasn't was not a good idea.

"Why we stopping mom?" I heard....again.

"Red light,Josie," I said.

"Look it's green," She said. Fortunately, having learned my lesson years ago, I looked up first.

"The light over there is green, but the arrow in front of me is red. I have to wait until that arrow is green," I said.

"Oh," she said and went back to reading her book.