There’s a response that people will sometimes use in jest when they are asked to tell their age. “Old enough to know better and too young to resist,” they will say. Usually there are a number of smiles. Of course, when it comes to one’s actions, maturity and experience are supposed to promote better behavior as a person gets older. Right?
Well, maybe.
One has to wonder about the actions of certain Octogenarians.
First of all, once people get past the age of 80, if not before in some cases, one has to wonder a bit about their driving ability at all. You have to hope that they will have the sense to recognize when it is getting to be a strain for them to see, judge distance, and remember where they are going. A recent accident over in Pennsylvania involved an 80 year old man driving through the plate glass window of a downtown Philadelphia Burger King restaurant – an action that caused harm to a number of people. Newscasters were “casting about” wondering what might have caused the accident. Some would say – he’s 80, what do you think?
On the other hand, some people of 80 or even 83 are fine drivers yet, but maybe they need to re-think some of their other behaviors. Take the incident on July 1, 2011 over in Brattleboro, Vermont. It seems that one of our long-term New Hampshire residents, a Mr. Russell Peachey stopped off in the I-91 rest area near Putney. Now if he had just minded his own business and used the rest area as most law-abiding citizens do, he wouldn’t have drawn any attention to himself. But for some reason that we don’t know, he committed a “lewd act” that we won’t describe, and the Vermont State Police were called.
As a result, the police trooper discovered several cases of grain alcohol inside of Peachey’s vehicle. There is a law that states how much alcohol can be transported from New Hampshire into Vermont, and Mr. Peachy exceeded the allowable quantity. He is now facing charges for both the “act” and the transport, and he’ll have to come back to Vermont later in August to appear in court.
Typical water-cooler discussions on this small story might debate whether he got himself into trouble because he had accessed some of the grain alcohol along the way, or whether he was just, allegedly, a “dirty old man.” Time will tell. But one moral of the story is this: once again we find a situation where someone breaking the law draws attention to himself, ensuring that he will be caught.
