I am writing this calmly, and I want that understood before we begin.
There is a shopping center near my house with a pharmacy, a dry cleaner, a sandwich place, and a parking lot. The parking lot has arrows. They are painted on the pavement in white, they are 6 feet long, and they point one way. They are not ambiguous. Nobody has ever painted an ambiguous arrow. That is the whole point of an arrow.
I have driven that lot in the direction of the arrows for 11 years. I have followed them in the rain. I have followed them in snow, when they could not be seen, from memory.
Last Saturday at 10:20 a.m. I entered the lot, turned right as instructed, and proceeded along the first row toward the dry cleaner. Halfway down, a man in a silver sedan came around the corner the wrong way, directly over an arrow, which was pointing at him, which he was sitting on top of. And he waved at me.
It was a friendly wave. That is what I cannot get past. It was the wave of a man who has never once looked down.
I did not honk. I am not a honker. I simply rolled down my window and informed him, at a conversational volume, that THE ARROWS ARE ON THE GROUND. THE GROUND IS THE ONE PLACE EVERYONE IS ALREADY LOOKING.
I apologize. I was holding something in, and then I was not. I am calm.
He said, “Oh, those are old.” Old. They are arrows. They do not expire. An arrow from 1953 points in the same direction as an arrow from this morning. THAT IS WHAT MAKES IT AN ARROW, GARY. I don’t know that his name was Gary. He had the look of a Gary, and I have chosen to address him as one in this column, calmly.
I then watched, from the correct lane, as four more cars drove against the arrows in the next six minutes, including a minivan, a pickup truck, a delivery van, and a woman on a riding mower, who I believe was lost but who was also, technically, going the wrong way. I am the only person in this lot who has read it.
To understand how we got here, I reached Prof. Desmond Achterberg, who holds the Prewitt Chair in Comparative Annoyance at Ellery State University. He told me that the painted directional arrow dates to a 1640s market town in what is now the Netherlands, where it was introduced to manage oxcarts and was ignored by the second oxcart. “There has never been a period in recorded history in which more than one person followed the arrows,” he said. “The scholarship identifies that person, in every century, as the man who wrote to the newspaper about it.” He said the scholarship was his.
I want to be fair to the other drivers. They are not bad people. They are simply people who do not understand that society is a series of arrows, and that the arrows are holding everything up.
So here is my proposal, and you will notice how modest it is. I am not asking for fines. I am not asking for a parking lot officer, though I would serve. I am asking only that every painted arrow in every parking lot in the nation be accompanied by a sign, at eye level, that reads “THERE IS AN ARROW,” and that every sign be accompanied by a second, smaller arrow, pointing at the sign, in case. That’s it. Two items per arrow. It’s the least we can do for the arrows.
In the meantime, I have done what I can at home. Last week I painted two arrows on my own driveway, so that cars enter on the left and exit on the right. My wife says our driveway is one car wide. I have explained that this is why the arrows are so important. She now exits across the lawn, which I have decided to count as a separate lane.
My blood pressure on Monday was 130 over 84. Last week it was 129 over 83. My doctor asked whether anything had changed. I told him nothing had changed. The arrows have not changed. That is my entire point.