Madness By Mattie

I’ve always been accused of having a lead foot but compared to my dear husband Ben’s foot, mine is more like aluminum titanium alloy. Not to mention that Ben is always, without fail, NICE to the cops who pull him over. I encourage him to be mean, rude, something other than roll-over-and-play-dead nice. At least then, the ticket would seem somewhat justifiable.

Since we’ve been married he has gotten about twice as many tickets as I have. Our insurance dropped us at one point because he was considered too much of a risk. To show them, I totaled his car a week later trying to avoid a deer. The ironic part of it all was the only reason he was not driving the car that day is I’d had a vivid dream the night before that he had gotten his license suspended for getting another ticket and I just knew he was going to get pulled over. I didn’t want to have to chauffeur him around until he got his license reinstated so I insisted that I drive us to Hailey despite the feelings I got multiple times that I should pull over and let him drive. (Some visionary I am!).

One Christmas Ben and I knew finances were a little tight. We had just bought a house that year and two large, hungry, hole-digging, dogs, and a new car. We decided that we wouldn’t get each other gifts for Christmas. Well Christmas morning there were gifts for me from Ben under the tree. I felt bad that I hadn’t gotten him anything and was a little shocked since we weren’t supposed to have done that. I was also surprised that he had picked out clothes that I liked and looked good on me. While family was in town we went to the store with his brother. I made a comment about how nice it was for Ben to get me a Christmas gift.
“It’s probably to make up for the speeding ticket he got,” I commented.
“I thought she didn’t know about that?” Enoch said turning to Ben.
“Ummm,” Ben replied.

It came out that Ben had gotten TWO tickets in TWO days in that SAME spot. He owed me more than a Christmas gift after I found out about that one.