eyes on the road.â
âWhy do you talk to yourself?â
âI know not why others may do so, but as for me it has always been a way to clarify my thinkingââ
âClarify somewhat.â
âIt has always been a way to clarify my thinking somewhat, and in the years that you and I have been together, it has been a way for me to prepare the witty aphorisms, entertaining anecdotes, and penetrating commentary that I use to impress, entertain, and seduce you.â
âDo you have anything ready?â
âMore or less.â
âSpeak.â
âIâve been reflecting on my role in this adventure.â
âAre we having an adventure?â
âLife is an adventure.â
âNot when Iâm waiting on line at the pharmacy.â
âOkay, but this part of our life together is an adventure, and Iâve been reflecting on my role in it. After all, there you are, at the wheel, clearly the driver, or pilot, and here I am, beside you, with a folder of maps at the readyââ
âA handsome leather folder of maps.â
âYes. Very manly. I appreciate that. But even with my maps I canât be considered the navigator, since you have chosen the route in advance and printed turn-by-turn directions from three map sites on the World Wide Web.â
âOh. I see. Iâm sorryââ
âNo need. No need. Iâve defined my role, and Iâm happy in it.â
âStud muffin?â
âNot while youâre driving.â
âYe gods, what good are you, then?â
âExactly the question, I think, that teenage boys used to ask themselves when they cadged rides from friends who had driverâs licenses and the use of the family car when they had neither themselves.â
âWhat good am I?â she cried to the open sky above the crystalline plastic top of the Electro-Flyer in excellent imitation of the wail of a boy whose voice is still changing.
âAnd the answer, Iâve decided, is that I am fulfilling the role that in my teenage years was called âriding shotgun.ââ
âNow why did you call it that?â she asked, speaking this time in the manner of Mr. MacPherson, my high school French teacher, an enthusiastic student of idiom.
âIâm glad you asked,â I said. âI can answer with confidence because as a boy I spent many Saturday mornings at the Babbington Theater, watching westerns.â In the voice of one who knows, I said, âMy dear Albertine, we teenage boys used the term because when we were even younger boys we had heard it used so often in westerns that involved stagecoach travel. In those movies, there were always bands of marauding bandits. I should point out that many of those bandits were actually good guys who, through no fault of their own, often just because of a case of mistaken identity, had been driven out of polite society and found themselves forced to turn to banditry to make a living. I donât mean to suggest that all the bad guys were good guys forced to be badâmany were actually badâmost of them, in fact. Sometimes they were greedy, and sometimes they were just mean. They had been brought up that way, I guess, or perhaps they had been starved for affection during childhood. Something like that. Anyway, the point that was brought home again and again to an impressionable boy in the Babbington Theater was that driving a stagecoach through the Old West was a dangerous undertaking, especially if the stage was carrying something valuable that bad guys would want, like gold or the new school marm or somebodyâs bride from Back East. The hills out there were crawling with bad guys. So, a stagecoach required, in addition to a driver, a second man sitting beside the driver, his right-hand man, right up there on the seat where the driver sat, a man who could fight off the bad guys if they attacked. This secondâbut equally importantâman