As we were driving along the highway at 6 in the morning, a car full of young men drove by us and we were quite amused to notice them noticing us. By this I mean, they were very obviously checking us out. After laughing and giggling, as girls are want to do, we realized we had no term in our vocabulary to describe such an experience, and thus the phrase "road check" was born.
On that trip, we experienced a range of such road checking, sometimes the recipients and sometimes the perpetrators. We also learned that sometimes road checking can have painfully awkward consequences. One time I made the mistake of performing a roadcheck on the car right beside us seconds before we entered stand still traffic. You can imagine my embarrassment as I tried to avoid eye contact while the car crawled by us at an agonizingly slow pace.
This embarrassment pales in comparison though to what I experienced today. Let me tell you my story.
I suppose I must blame it all on my piano student. I could go as far as to blame my previous music teachers and by extent my mother, for if I wasn't musically trained I would never have had a piano student over the summer and this whole thing never would have happened! But that feels a bit extreme, so I shall merely blame it on my student.
It all started last week when I was leaving my piano student's house and her mother came up and began talking to me. She commented that she had seen my father ride along Clear Creek Road (the road I had to take to get to there house and back) quite often and remarked that he must do it during his lunch breaks. I obviously don't know exactly what my dad does when he's on lunch but he has recently begun riding his bike to work and becoming more interested in exercise, so it seemed like a perfectly logical statement. Anyway, the week passed and I completely forgot about this conversation until today when I was driving back home from teaching piano lessons and I saw a bike rider along Clear Creek Road.
This biker was coming toward me, riding on the opposite side of the road with his head bent to the wind, pedaling furiously on his sleek black bike. He looked incredibly familiar, like someone I knew very well. And then it dawned on me: This must be my Dad on one of his lunchtime excursions! Just as this thought entered my head, my car passed the biker and I was unable to get a clear view of him. I determined then to turn around and drive up alongside him to see if it truly was my father. So I took a left, used some random persons driveway for a 3 point turn and began my pursuit of that biker. As I came up behind him I became increasingly certain that he was in fact my father. He had the same bike, same helmet, same profile and same build. So I slowed my car, rolled down my window and hollered out these fated words:
"Hey Handsome!"
To this, the biker turned his head and replied with a hardy"Hey there!" all the while flashing his pearly whites!
I could feel my cheeks growing hot and my stomach sinking. That face, that physique, that profile and that biker looked a whole lot different at a closer proximity, but it was too late for me. There was no way I could recall my statement and save myself from the impending embarrassment of a roadcheck gone wrong. So I did what any girl in a car would do: I fled the scene!
Keep in mind, I had turned around to come back to hit on that biker, and there was nothing in the world that would induce me to turn round again and pass him a third time. The humiliation would be too much to bear! So I took the long way home, driving 10 minutes to the next town before I could hop on a freeway and turn around.
So let this be a lesson to you all! If you want to save yourself from humiliation, awkwardness and wasted gas money, be wary in your road checking..... or just abstain from it...it's overrated anyway! :)
I got home, told my family and we all had a good laugh, so I guess these experiences are good for something! :)
Beware of Bikers!! :)
Oh and,
~Keep Smiling!~ :)
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