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Inside Out

Sharing the rules

Jeanne Sager
Posted 4/18/23

When you grow up in the sort of town that has narrow unmarked roads, the kind that require drivers to pull to the side to let another car pass, there are rules you learn early.  

Walk on …

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Inside Out

Sharing the rules

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When you grow up in the sort of town that has narrow unmarked roads, the kind that require drivers to pull to the side to let another car pass, there are rules you learn early. 

Walk on the side of the road opposite traffic. 

Bike on the side of the road that runs with traffic. 

It’s one of the rules of the road ingrained that when a sign reiterating these rules was posted not too long ago on the very narrow unmarked road where I was raised, it gave me pause. 

OK, it was more than a pause. 

There was a swell of indignance. Did people really need to be told this fact so basic that I’d learned it as a small child? 

It was in mulling it over that a memory from my past hit me. When walking on sidewalks in New York City as a fresh-faced college student, I noticed one day that most people walked on the right side. Those who didn’t were like salmon swimming against the current, only instead of river water to bounce off of, they were facing the shoulders of angry New Yorkers. 

There weren’t many sidewalks where I grew up, and even those that existed had hardly enough people on them at any one time to require rules. I’d lived to 17 without learning this basic rule. 

When walking on a sidewalk, the rules are the polar opposite of those for walking directly on a roadway. Is it any wonder some people were confused?

This insight is hardly earth shattering, and yet what it afforded me was a simple reminder to check my indignation ... and my expectations. 

Small children growing up in different parts of the country develop different skill sets and different understandings of the world around them. 

I may have been able to spot poison ivy by age 4, but most city-born 4-year-olds could put 17-year-old me to shame when it came to standing tall and not falling on a lurching subway car. 

We share roads. We share sidewalks. We share subway cars. 

And sometimes we just need to share the rules. 

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