Looking in My Rear View Mirror, I Saw Myself One Car Back

I bee-line it to the back of the lot with my children and get into my car, rev the engine and prepare for takeoff.

But like all things at Our Lady of Condemnation, there are rules about this. It must be done fairly and in an orderly fashion. And provoke a maximum amount of frustration.

So as I sit in my car, listening to my children chatter and argue about all manner of pre-pubescent issues, from who has a pimple to who has B.O., to who likes whom, to whose sister told the entire lunch table that he wets the bed, I am growing more and more frustrated with the Pick Up Line.

It's only fair, that we should be dismissed in an orderly fashion. But it is not necessarily the order in which we arrived.

Where when we pulled in, we populated rows from left to right, we are dismissed in columns, right to left. Which makes no difference at all when you were jammed into the last row barely squeaking in between the next car and the iron fence. But people who made it a point to arrive well before the appointed hour are a little pissed under the best of circumstances. It's like when you wait in the turning lane for a whole light series and the bonehead in front of you has positioned his car so as to not trip the signal to let the arrow people go next.

Completely fair or not, it makes no sense at all. Because while many of us are in our cars, motors running and prepared to get the hell out of Dodge, there are a number of parents, okay, mothers mostly, either still in the gym, or standing in the general vicinity of their cars, carrying on lengthy conversations with other mothers, while the rest of us wait.

Horns are blaring. High beams are being flashed. Obscenities yelled from darkened cars. Still, these clueless parents prattle on and on with no end in sight while my children yawn and fade in the back seat. It is, after all, crowding in on 8:30.

Some of them actually acknowledge that they are holding up the works, point their keyless entry fobs in the general direction of their vehicles and let their kids scramble among the (motionless) cars to get in and take a load off.

Yet the mothers themselves - THE DRIVERS - remain engrossed in conversation, evidently so crucial to national security that it can not be delayed, interrupted, continued at a later date and time, or truncated in any way.

And all the while, those cars who remain BEHIND them in the all-important line, wait with homicidal thoughts that are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

And if the column next to you should afford enough space for you to go around the unoccupied car in front of you while its driver yammers on oblivious to the mayhem for which they are the root cause, one of the over-zealous volunteer parents will throw himself in front of your car to prevent you from recklessly careening through the lot headed for the exit the like the one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, surely a danger to yourself and others.

And so we wait. And beep and flash our high beams. And swear from our cars not caring if the dashboard lights reveal our identities.

And when we are afforded freedom from the oppression of the Pick Up Line, we do not refrain from glaring at these mothers from our cars as they look back at us with innocent inability to comprehend what the hell you could be so pissed about.