Crumbs From the Corner: Adventures in Woolgathering

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Villain of the Roads



"Possible's slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination."
-Emily Dickinson

Ireland's worst driver has been apprehended, after an exhaustive investigation. The elusive fellow, originally from Poland, was stopped more than fifty times for speeding offences or similar matters.
Prawo Jazdy's name was entered into the police files, but he never responded to the numerous official notifications and he declined to pay his increasing dues. Most inexplicably, he continued to motor peacefully around the country avoiding capture.
Many a blue moon passed but it was at long last established that the rascal was not, after all, a flesh and blood driver, but the Polish term for 'Driver's Licence.'
It dawned on the frustrated, baffled police that on numerous occasions they had extracted precisely the wrong information from each culprit's licence, thereby setting free the reckless drivers- who did not know their good fortune- and unwittingly breathing fierce life into a bold, daring identity by the name of Prawo Jazdy.
And how that legend dwindled pitifully at the sobering news that Mr. Jazdy was neither a devious rogue nor a villain of the winding roads- was no more than a pair of foreign words!
Let us be slow to tamper with illusion and myth, for fear of reducing rousing, intrepid stories to dull explanations.

4 comments:

ArtSparker said...

Do you know of the American writer James Thurber, who wrote about a man who lost his eyeglasses and as a reuslt saw many interesting things, among them an Admiral in Full uniform on a bicycle...and so on to:

"He thought he saw an elephant
That played upon a fife:
He looked again and found it was
A portrait of his wife".

-Lewis Carroll

Phyllis Hunt McGowan said...

ArtSparker, I do know of James Thurber, I think that's a most interesting story- and a good way to come up with new ideas and see the world differently!

Lanny said...

That is so sad that you have all lost a rogue. Now fathers have nothing to rail about, mothers nothing to tsk, brothers nothing to secretly admire and young maidens nothing for their dreams.

Phyllis Hunt McGowan said...

Lanny, indeed, they don't know what they lost ;) and those drivers never knew that an imaginary legend saved them from paying the price.

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