"Citizen Martha"

Every City that has ten thousand people, more or less. Has main streets where the businesses are located. Most city main streets are two lane and have yellow center line in the middle of the street.  Other streets with heavy traffic use, are one way only and there are usually two, each going in the opposite direction. Most people pay attention to the direction the traffic flow and travel in that direction.

However, there are some senior citizens, people with certain problem, such as poor sight, hearing and reaction time, which continue to drive as they did when they used horse and buggies or when they were young and traffic was little to none. I have one lady in particular, in mind. She is ninety six years of age, lives by herself and does everything in and around her home by herself.

Her physical size and condition prevents her from setting behind a steering wheel in a car and being able to see over the dash board. She would require several pillows to lift her high enough to do this. Her name is Martha and Martha has been experiencing memory problems. At times, she gets lost in her own home and wanders around until she recovers from this spell. Martha will not admit that she needs help nor will she accept it. If she has any family in the area, it is unknown.

Not long ago. Martha decided that she had an appointment on the other side of the city and was driving to keep it. She entered a one way street traveling in the wrong direction.  She hit or sideswiped several cars and cause many more cars to become involved in other accidents.

The entire City Police department, along with every emergency vehicle in the city were called out to investigate the damage and treat those that were injured. This never slowed Martha down for a minute.

Arriving at the destination address, she found that she didn’t have an appointment after all. She accused the staff of making a mistake.  After returning to her car, she got in, but the vehicle wouldn’t’ start. With some assistants from another lady, a taxi was called and she returned to her home. Listening to the news on her radio, she heard about the disaster on a street in her city and thought how lucky she was to have missed it.

It wasn’t long before the Police had located the car that was involved or had caused the accident and they retrieved the owners name and address from the registration papers. A patrol car was dispatched to the address and they were speaking with the elderly lady, but she said she had no idea of what the police were talking about, so they insisted that she accompany them, to the police station.

One police officer was going to help her and offered her his arm, so she could steady herself. She objected to him touching her arm and with one mighty swing of her hand bag, she struck the officer on the side of his head and he fell unconscious to the lawn.  When they arrived at the police station, her anger was out of control and her arms were swinging and legs were kicking and it took four officers and a wheel chair to get her into the police station.  

Unknown to the police officers, Martha’s dinner, was burning on an old gas range in the kitchen of Martha’s house. It wasn’t long before the kitchen was on fire. No emergency vehicle could respond, as they were all at the accident scene on the one way street!

The house had burnt to the ground and nothing could be seen but ashes. If fact, houses in several city blocks had burnt down and the whole east side of the city was about to burn.

Meanwhile, the police didn’t appear to be getting anywhere with Martha. It was going to take more than the entire police force to control this senior citizen. Martha was using words and language that the police didn’t understand and they had to look up some of these words in a dictionary and some of them words couldn’t even be found in the book. 

Several months had passed and now we find Martha, living in one of the better nursing homes in the next county. Lawyers and the news media were having a field day with the story, even the national news had picked-up the story, of the old lady that had destroyed a city, single handedly. 

We find Martha, relaxing in a covered swinging lounge, in the garden of the nursing home, smiling and thinking to herself, that will teach those people not to mess around with old Martha.

By; Ben R.

Sept. 6, 2014