Baby on Board…

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…And he’s in the driver’s seat. A beautiful night, a night where one can do nothing but just stand there yet release buckets of sweat from their pores. Regardless, after having been dragged up to my grandmother’s house, a humid little oven with a cooling system so strong that penguins leave Antarctica for just one feel of it, I decided that I would head elsewhere. My mother and sister joined me, and we went to the beach.

It was a great drive down to the beach. Nobody tailgating me, no hassles on the road. We had the music blaring, and as the filthy lyrics were spat seductively we watched our mother’s complexion turn paler and paler, but we reassured her that the music was nice ‘cruising music’, music that even the car would dance to. And she was okay with that. After all, we will have to listen to her loud Lebanese music the next time she takes us somewhere in her car, so it was a decent deal.

The first stop was the area after the pier and before the beach, where my favorite gelato van hangs around, selling the best tasting orange gelato to date at a cheap rate, too. Just as I parked beside him, he turned off his lights and turned the van on, preparing himself to leave after having spent the entire day melting like the ice-cream he sold to little toddlers who knew no better than to eat it before the sun did. My mother and sister panicked. I made them run to the van as I stayed behind to roll my windows up, and surely enough he decided to serve us some gelato. It is fine – I tipped him an extra thirteen dollars for our having been a nuisance to him.

We enjoyed our gelato, each one of us a varied cone of frozen goodness. My mother was the first one to feel it: a giant grasshopper flew from around us, evading the seagulls, and chose her arm as the best landing spot. She shrieked after realizing it wasn’t her hair stroking her, and threw all of her belongings besides her gelato on the floor and jumped. We decided to get back into the car and roll onto the next stop, the beach. When we got there we walked past couples until we found more grasshoppers and decided to sit beneath the light. Smart of us, yes? Not really, because fifteen minutes into our sitting, my left hand, which was cupped, palm facing the bright night sky, became a landing spot for an even bigger grasshopper, and  it caressed my little fingers before I managed to jump, shriek and power-walk back to my car. My mother and sister followed.

Air conditioner on, we began to drive around the neighborhood on our way home. On a street where the limit was 50kmph, a speedy red Commodore was driving just over 20kmph, and slowed down even more when he found out that I was behind him. My mother and sister assured me that there was a baby on board, having read his little yellow placard on his back window. I decided to wait until there was nothing between our lane and the oncoming lane, and no cars, and I decided to overtake him since he was too stubborn to move for me to pass – and what does he do? He decides to match my speed with his car, and I could not speed more in case my mother’s hair was completely overcome with the color grey, so I sped up as much as I could just avoiding the car on the oncoming lane. I slammed my brakes having just passed him, and looked through my rear-view mirror to see a laughing brat, showing his friend how ‘cool’ it was to nearly send the person behind him to collide with oncoming traffic. I was about to come to a complete stop and make use of the hardest object in my car, when I decided that a taste of his own medicine was better. I drove even slower in front of him, and he decided to give my middle finger a spotlight as he flashed his high beams. I stuck it up, and it surely danced long enough for me to dispel some of my anger. When the road allowed, he took to the lane beside me and just as I turned off into another street, decided to honk his horn at me and throw obscenities.

My mother told him to “shut up” , so I knew at that moment that despite my having scared her during the happening, she was on my side again. We drove off into the night, cruising around my street waiting for my father to notify us that he arrived at home after he was left by us at our grandmother’s house. He called, and we headed back.

It is occurrences such as this where I begin to wonder whether some drivers have this placard on their rear windows to notify us that they have limited driving skills, because if they really did have a ‘baby on board’ then they would not attempt to cause a collision, and they would consider that other drivers behind them who are sharing their wide road need to drive somewhere much closer to the speed limit than them so that they may allow room for these drivers, rather than turning what started out as an innocent family cruise fueled by the interfering of grasshoppers into an episode from Speed Racer fueled by the interfering of an immature driver who is possibly avoiding the attention of the police by pretending to have a baby on board when in reality they are the baby who needs to be tucked far, far away from a supercharged vehicle and even further away from being able to reach any form of license which permits them to operate a vehicle.

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Now, the next time I see a car with a ‘baby on board’ placard attached to it, I will automatically assume that they have no such thing on board other than a potentially underdeveloped brain sitting in the driver’s seat, and I will try with my very best efforts not to attempt to entice them into believing that my very strong car wants to race their even stronger car because I am one of those limited amounts of people left in the civilization of drivers who believe that drivers should be critically aware of the speeding limit so as to ensure the bad temper of the people driving behind them are not to be tampered with. Yes, I drove on the wrong side of the road for an excess of five or so seconds exposing me to risk, however had I not calmed down enough I would have spent more than five seconds exposing the twat behind me to several risks.

And what infuriates me more is that unlike this certain twat, I abide by the speed limit and yet certain other twats choose to want to observe my tail-lights up close, so close that scientists have never seen the movement of bacteria even with the aid of a microscope in such closeness. Tailgaters should make themselves useful and clean things on the back of my car to save me from doing it.

What upsets me the most in this entire ordeal is that he did not sing 'Baby on Board' by The Be Sharps to console me. Twat.

Baby on Board

“Oh my God, Shut up! Shut up! Enough!”

“Sir, I really don’t think that that is appropriate to say to my chil-“
“I’ve had enough! Oh my god, all the way!”

“Stop telling my child to shut up!”

“Stop telling me to shut up, and tell your child to shut up! You bloody stupid!”

Today, this was not a conversation I was merely eavesdropping on. It was not a conversation from a stranger. It was initiated by my father, who was infuriated with the constant loud crying of the chubby infant behind him on the flight back to Melbourne.

I had only thirty minutes of sleep, and the entire time that I was kept awake by the discomfort of the hotel bed and my mother’s snoring, I heard my father pacing the kitchen and living room, unable to sleep as well. The sleep that I acquired is barely what my father acquired too, so it is safe to say that we were quite on edge. The flight from Melbourne to Queensland bared the same crying infant, though he was perched beside someone in the start of the plane, and my father, seated with us at the back, said, “I feel sorry for whoever is sitting next to him.” The irony that the infant sat right behind my father was too much to cope in the duration of the flight.

Two whole hours – my mother had modeled a ship out of the vomit bag provided to her for the flight, to give to the infant in order to calm him down, however I told her that I would rather not see her breakfast than see it sprawled all over the innocent passenger sitting in front of her. She unfolded it, and returned it to her spot. The infant kept crying. Its mother did nothing in those entire two hours to soothe him, nor did the father. There were around five other infants on board, and their parents kept them quiet and entertained with ‘whooshing’ and other noises that planes make, and gestures. Unluckily for this baby, though, its parents begged to differ, and my father’s patience was running thinner.

And so, the burst of conversation above happened. Every passenger turned in our direction and tried to contain their laughter. My sister, mother and I certainly could not. My father was seated next to two good-looking young men, too, who he most likely had deafened in the miniature dispute. The flight attendants dared not comment, they simply hurried past, doing their jobs of checking the chairs and passenger bagging faster, to avoid an imaginary explosion of my father’s insides from pure anger.

The funniest thing about this entire ordeal was not the flight attendant’s reaction, nor mine nor my mother nor my sister’s nor anyone else on the plane, but the fact that the infant, after being screamed at to “shut up” actually had. In fact, after my dad had shook the plane with his voice more than turbulence, the infant had sat there with its eyes widened and mouth sealed shut. A Japanese man wearing white headphones seated across from me could not stop giggling to himself. Surely, my father had done what everyone else on the plane wished they had. It was an 8am flight, and nobody had time for a constantly wailing infant in the midst of turbulence.

The infant’s father, I predicted, was soon to fight with my father after the plane had landed. When it did, however, and my father stood from his seat, he overshadowed the infant’s father by height and by weight and by anger, so the infant’s father slumped back down in his chair slowly and acted as though the incident never occurred in the first place. In fact, I could have sworn he would have given his infant as a sacrificial meal to my infuriated father, had he been any bigger than he is.

That moment in time was certainly entertaining for me and all the plane passengers, except for that infant. Why is it that infants are allowed on flights? I only dared for less than a few seconds to imagine this situation on a flight that went for over twelve hours – in that event, I presume that my father would have catapulted the infant, its mother and father out of the entire plane with one breath.