Catharsis at Home Depot

So I'm suffering from a bad case of treppenwitz today, after yesterday an obnoxious driver cut me off on the road after riding impertinently close behind me. While the situation is all-too-common yesterday's instance of vehicular barbarism stands out because I had the opportunity of having my say with one of those discourteous drivers. At long last after years of abhorrent drivers zooming unpunished into the distance, I had my chance for revenge at Home Depot.

Yet just when the moment of triumph was upon me, when I felt the blood summoned up and the shades of Cicero and Demosthenes hovering over my shoulders, the sight of the man moved me to pity.

He stood there, a shabbily dressed shlub clutching his crumpled receipt in the return line. The sight of him reduced from marauding Visigoth—so I had imagined him—to simply, "next customer," robbed me of all desire for vengeance. In his fancy sports car he seemed a raging terror. Without it he was nearly invisible. If you noticed him, you might say he was a little over-fed, a little unwitting. Yet the incongruity of his meek comportment and reckless driving fascinated me.

What had the machine done to its lowly owner, or what passions had it unleashed and enabled? Was he a basically good man whose demons were let loose at the wheel, or was he a real wretch whose unkindness we strangers were spared only on account of his cowardice? It seems unlikely he was a powerful man who acted meekly but drove like one possessed. Could he have been brazen, or was his apparent indifference the soft confidence of the untested?

Worse than such miserable possibilities was the fact that though he stood there an average man whom any onlookers would have said seemed decent and harmless enough, there I and only I knew that on the road he endangered people and treated them badly. Part of me felt guilty, that my gaze made his guilt manifest to all, though of course he did not recognize me as the driver he had so cursorily passed minutes ago. Yet another part of me felt empowered, that I held knew some inner secret of his character.

I had still wanted to reproach and reprimand him, but at the same time the sight of him there, not impudent as he was on the road, but powerless, the husk of his car—that mechanical prop of his insensate intemperance—cast aside and his runaway excess laid bare, exited feelings of pity and fear within me. Pity that such ignorance is the lot of mankind, and fear that I seem far less virtuous than I imagine, for who does not imagine that his vices are mild and hidden, and that his virtues are great and self-evident?

In the end I prolonged his tragedy and deprived him of the opportunity to show shame and remorse, in part because of my amateur psychological speculations but in greater part because when our paths met again he paused to allow me to pass. In the moment I was flabbergasted.

Perhaps his fatal flaw will resolve heroically in self-sacrifice, or perhaps it will find its final resting place when he cuts off a driver like himself. In either case, his ignorance is still my catharsis, for as I envision the day of his reckoning, I imagine my own flaws, ashamed, but encouraged to improve.

Alas, though, I finally did think of a real zinger of an insult.