Let's make a deal

So here’s the deal.


Before you get behind the wheel, you do not drink, you do not inhale or ingest or inject anything that messes up your judgment a single iota.

You don’t cross that solid yellow line. No matter how slow the RV in front of you or how late you are. You keep your wheels glued to the asphalt in your lane until the dotted line shows up.

You don’t hit or punch or slap anybody. Ever. Walk away, walk to China if that’s what it takes. If you’re in China, walk to Albuquerque. Or run, hard, if that melts your mad faster.

You don’t say cruel things. You don’t wrap a right hook in “just kidding” and pretend it’s a friendly slug. Clamp your jaw shut, bite your lip bloody, chew gum, whatever it takes to keep those hurtful jabs masquerading as jibes inside and unspoken.

And top of mind today: you do not touch that cell phone while you are driving.

I don’t care if it’s the Pope calling to invite you to communion or Britney asking you to sing lead on her new single or your spouse telling you your winning lottery ticket showed up in the wash.

Because we both know it’s not. We both know that whatever is making your phone vibrate or that red light flash is nowhere near that important.

Here’s the other part of the deal: I won’t do any of these things either.

What? You don’t remember the deal? You don’t recall promising never to do any of this stuff?

Know it or not, you did. With the first breath you took in this lifetime, you promised. It’s called “the social contract.”

It means that you drive clean and sober, stay on your side of the yellow line, keep your nasty remarks unremarked and your fists at your side.

It means that you bring no pain or injury to me or my family or my friends or my co-workers or that friendly lady at my dry cleaners or the neighbor boy with the mischievous brown eyes.

And I will do the same for you.

Because if we both keep our promise, neither of us will have to spend a cloudless summer afternoon as I did last Friday at a memorial service for an 18-year-old boy. A boy who exactly one week earlier was walking down a road with his older sister.

A boy still figuring out what kind of man he would be. An outrageously smart, funny kid, who questioned the rules and lived by his own, full of bravado and hopes and doubts and a future that spread to the horizon. All of it gone, simply gone, in one unthinkable thud.

In that instant, when a text seemed way more urgent than keeping your hands at 10 and 2 and your gaze straight ahead, you ignored the deal. Maybe you figured there was some fine print in the contract that said it was OK to take your eyes off the road for a split second.

But in that microcosm of time—that tiny universe of bad judgment that will always be with you—you swerved. And you changed everything. Your truck hit the boy – his name was Cassidy Ringwald -- and he flew 15 feet into the intersection and landed hard, broken in too many places to fix.

Your text broke a lot of other people too.

Cassidy’s dad, Scott, worked at Intel for something like 25 years. He retired at an enviably young age a couple of years ago. Instead of working as a manufacturing manager in TMG these days he heads the parent-teacher group at Cassidy’s small alternative high school. He teaches math there, too. He and his only son liked a lot—but not all—of the same music.

I don’t know what Mary, Cassidy’s mother, is up to these days. When she was my neighbor all those years she was one of those smiling moms whose dining room table was always covered with her kids’ latest art or science project. I couldn’t bring myself to ask a woman with that much pain in her face what she’s been doing lately.

So, that’s the deal: You don’t mess with me or my family or anyone I care about, and I don’t mess with you or yours.

It’s the price you pay for the privilege of being alive. It’s the golden rule. It’s the social contract.

Sign it.