Want to be punchy

My wife and I, most mornings we walk our son the ten minutes to his school. Yesterday, she told us to go ahead and she would catch up with us. Which she did, just a couple of streets from our home. Two more streets later, I idly notice a large maroon car gliding to a stop on the road just in front of us. As we pass, my wife whispers to me, remind me to tell you about that car.

Drop our son off, we're walking back, and I remember. What about that car, I ask her.

As she came out of our lane, she saw this car passing. For a minute, it looked to her like the car a friend of ours owns, so she peered briefly at the driver to see if it was him. It wasn't, so she kept walking, then caught up with us. Next thing she knows, the same car is gliding to a stop pretty much next to us. The man had actually driven around the block, so to speak, to find her again.

Pity, this time he found her with a paunchy husband and a young son. Pity, she didn't tell me in time, because the paunchy husband might have become punchy.

You hear about women being harrassed, sure. But sometimes I'm astonished at the kinds of things they have to guard against. I mean, who would have thought, a commuting executive, driving hurriedly down a small maze of one-way streets and reappearing, all because a woman peered briefly and mistakenly at him? What did he think she would do, I wonder?

***
I can't tell you how tired I've gotten of that old mantra, we "worship" women and "respect" them like our own mothers. I got inundated with this stuff, for example, when I wrote this article a few years ago. Far as I'm concerned, the mantra's meaningless. Worse: I think that attitude -- the smug complacency implicit in it -- contributes to the bad things that happen to women.

And that's why I remember one response to that article in particular. A woman. She wrote, can someone tell these guys that we women don't want to be placed on a pedestal, we don't want to be worshipped! We just want to be treated as more human beings!