The real reason traffic deaths are down

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administrations announced last month traffic fatalities are at their lowest levels in 60 years.

Officials cited a number of factors, increased seat belt use, safer cars and a decline in drunken driving.

But the real reason traffic deaths are down is this: Traffic jams ... we're not going fast enough anymore to harm ourselves.

Every where I traveled this summer I sat in traffic.

On the New Jersey Turnpike. On the Washington, D.C., Beltway. On Interstate 95 in Connecticut. On Interstate 495 in Massachusetts. On Route 4 in front of my house here in New Hampshire.

Age has given me some patience. I've learned to accept things that are beyond my control. Except in traffic. I want to know why things aren't moving along, particularly on the eight-lane New Jersey Turnpike in the middle of a fine afternoon.

Accidents, I can understand. Construction, I get it. Part of it was the federal stimulus money that went to the repair of roads and bridges. My tax dollars were at work pissing me off, and I accept that. But it's no wonder the Republicans were so ticked off about the stimulus; they just don't accept traffic jams no matter what the circumstances.

When there's no reason for a slowdown, I start to go out of my mind.

I think this is how road rage starts to boil. When circumstances rise beyond the level of comprehension and acceptance.

I see it regularly where I live, as traffic slows to a crawl going over the Little Bay Bridge during the morning and evening commutes.

The reason it slows is because of the sunrise in the morning and sunset in the evening.

I don't know why, but people hit the top of the bridge, see the rising sun, hit their brakes and remark, "My God, a rising sun." It's like they're seeing the sun rise for the first time every morning.

Coming home it's the same thing. They hit the top of the bridge and see a setting sun and slow down.

It's the only possible explanation because nothing else is happening at the time. No weather. No construction. No accidents. Just Mr. Sun.

I'm glad traffic deaths are down. And I'll continue to do my part and buckle up, seek to buy safer cars, and make sure I don't drive drunk.

But I can't abide by the traffic jams.

I want to go 80 again … or at least the speed limit.

Thanks, Doc

We have any number of teachers in our lives, many of them outside the classroom.

John "Doc" Enos was one of them for me.

Doc, who died Sunday at age 79, was a reporter for the Gloucester, Mass., Daily Times.

I interned there during the fall semester of 1973 as a junior at the University of New Hampshire. My newspaper reporting internship required me to live in Gloucester and work full-time doing whatever I was assigned to do.

I was clueless and scared to death. Doc made it a lot easier, both by his manner of caring and by the example of his work ethic.

His quiet -- though sometimes grumbling -- demeanor was a calming counterpoint to the gruff, bombastic city editor, Bill Cahill.

He loved Gloucester, loved Gloucester sports; hockey and football were his particular passions. He'd sit through all kinds of games -- freshmen, junior varsity and varsity, even intramural games.

He covered sports, he covered the cops and crime, and just about anything and everything else in Cape Ann.

The memories of his co-workers, shared in emails among us this week, told his story.

"After a couple of violent episodes in Gloucester, I started feeling really anxious sitting in that well-lit, very visible office all alone finishing up the paper," recalled Nan Cobbey. "Doc sensed that so when we were on together he would always find an excuse to stick around until I was able to leave."

"It's hard to say which Enos memory is most quintessentially Doc.It could be his shoveling the walk after every snowfall," recalled Bernie O'Donnell. "Or it could his long-running, high-volume arguments with Cahill over obscure Gloucester trivia that no one else understood (always ending in 'Why don't you just shut up!)"

Or the time, when the lights were out in the office because of a blackout, he drove his car close enough to shine the headlights inside. He sat on the floor at his manual typewriter, doing his story.

Ever the model of ingenuity and efficiency.

At the going-away party at the end of my internship, he was convinced that each one of was would be arrested for drunken driving or drunk and disorderly conduct ... or both.

So he got out his reporter's notebook and a pen and started taking the names, ages and addresses of everyone at the party. He said it would save him time in the morning on deadline when he wrote up the overnight cop report.

Much of the Gloucester Times alumni gathered for a night to honor Doc in 2004 (picture above). Longtime Gloucester editor Peter Watson remembered that when it was Doc's turn to talk, after most everyone had had their chance, Doc said, “I have been sitting here for an hour wondering who you people are talking about.”

Doc's funeral mass was said yesterday at Our Lady of Good Voyage Church in Gloucester. Fitting.

Good voyage, Doc.

Goodbye to a good car

What is it about our relationships with cars?

We get emotionally attached. We thank them for being good ... like that cold winter morning start. We curse them for being bad ... like that cold winter morning grind that wears the battery down to nothing.

Sometimes we give them names: Tex, Donny, Vinnie.

We clean them, we bathe them, we feed them with gas.

And we mourn their passing, which I'm doing for the 2002 Mazda 626 that was sent to scrap last week.

It's not like this car had a quirky personality that made it so lovable. I never named it. It was just "the Mazda" -- a solid, fairly pedestrian four-door means of transportation.

It's the car's history -- particularly where it took my children -- that made it lovable.

It was the car in 2008 that took my daughter Elizabeth safely to Cincinnati for a three-month hospital affiliation as part of her physical therapy degree.

It was the car in 2009 that took my son David (see photo) and his two friends on an extended cross-country journey. It was part pack mule, part camper and part dining room in addition to being the wheels that got them from here to there to everywhere.

I've always had the feeling that our cars are self aware.

How else can you explain why they do what they do when they do it?

Something happens with them at the most inconvenient time, like it's payback for something we did to them or something we said about them or something we're thinking about them.

It's what happened with the Mazda.

David had been using the car while he lived in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston. And he'd been accepted into graduate school at Columbia University in New York City.

He doesn't have a need for a car there. I didn't have a need for the car, so the question was how to get it back to New Hampshire to be sold.

Then the transmission gave out about a month before David left for New York. The repair was going to be too costly for me to recover in a sale on top of what I still owed on the car.

The Mazda made the decision about its future.

I went into Jamaica Plain to make arrangements to have it scrapped. David cleaned it out, found a few dollars worth of change: penny, nickel, dime and quarter memories of a trip among three amigos.

And I touched the hood and said, "Thanks."

It didn't have the personality of other cars I've had -- Tex the Midnight Rambler, Donny Dart or even Vinnie Volvo.

But any car that kept my children safe for as many miles as they rode in it is a good car in my book.