Four XTERRANS and a funeral

Saturday wasn't a good day for running errands.

First it was XTERRA. Drivers were gawking and gaping as dribs and drabs of competitors passed by. Yeah, I know, they get strung out after awhile so you can't see them all at once.

For me, it's worth the hassle and the $150,000. That's a lot of publicity for Saipan and the CNMI, and positive for a change. Well, except for our lovable boonie dogs getting half of the Saipan Tribune story. I didn't get it from the Tribune's website, folks. It was number two on a 'Saipan' news search I have set up.

Then, around noon, I got caught behind a funeral just as I got to Fish and Tackle. That used to be the bottleneck before we had traffic lights. Ah, the memories, and since I didn't have anything else to do for awhile I wallowed in them.

It might be hard to believe today, but traffic snarls made people nicer back then, not meaner. If you had been stuck at a stop sign for awhile, you could count on somebody stopping to let you out. Sometimes they'd let everybody out. That got irritating, especially if they were the hot-rodders who zipped behind Mt. Carmel Church (it wasn't a cathedral) and the Nauru Building to cut ahead of line. I mean, why reward hyper people?

Luckily, I lived in the north and only the occasional all-night adventure or early appointment got me stuck there in the morning.

You'd even get stuck behind the occasional carabao cart, just until they found a place to pull over. It sure would be nice if people could remember the good old days when the traffic lights go out.

I have a Japanese car radio and public radio wasn't my cuppa tea. An ancient U2 and an older Jimmy Buffet tape were all I had. If you haven't memorized the lyrics, you can't understand them. That left me with my imagination and three tweens who don't much like my music anyway. So I thought about tourism.

But that's another story.

BTW: No letter-writing please. XTERRANS may be aliens, but they're not trying to stay.