Girls Gone (Not That) Wild

I drove for 12 hours over the weekend and saw a full-size deer dead on the highway, not ten miles from Manhattan. I also saw two young guys in yarmulkes having a picnic at the rest stop. I had just bought a bacon-and-chicken wrap inside and was perched on my tailgate pulling off all the bacon. “You bought your own food too!” one called over and how could I correct him when he seemed so eager and cheerful?When I was inside buying this wrap I had also seen an 80-year-old in short-shorts and a girl six feet tall wrapping her 5-foot-2-inch boyfriend in a bear-hug from behind. Now in the parking lot I also saw a baby boy in his car seat waving at his stuffed dog.And really all that was just prelude – because out on the highway again I kept passing a green Ford Explorer with the phrase “Girls Gone Wild” hand-painted in bright-pink letters on the driver’s side. On the back it said “New York or Bust!” and had two tiny flags affixed to the mud flaps reading “Hot to Trot.”When, ten miles down the road, it passed me I saw the lettering on the passenger side that explained it all: “Caitlin’s Bachelorette Party,” it read and as it whizzed by I could just glimpse within an earnest-looking female driver, five or six lounging female forms, and, propped on the sill of the shotgun seat window, one slender foot topped by five painted toenails as round and even as kernels of August corn and didn't this last sight redeem all the rest for me. Because whatever crazy thing we women might seem to be saying about ourselves, really we are never wild in the way that might get a guy's hopes up. Really all women are what they have been since the dawn of history: creatures of the utmost cautiousness who look to the future and take excellent care of their feet.