The winner ain’t the one with the fastest car, it’s the one who refuses to lose.
~Dale Earnhardt
When I visited my grandparents in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, Grandma and I always “dragged the gut,” which meant riding up and down the main street to see what was going on. We did this as often as possible after any excursion. The main street in Pawhuska is called Kihekha (as Pawhuska is the seat of the Osage Nation), and runs from east to west. It is about ten short blocks. Even though it runs right by the police station, most people go faster than the standard twenty miles an hour.
One Sunday, Grandma and I were coming back from picking chokecherries and had four full baskets in the back seat of the car, along with our red hands and mouths. As it happened, we were stopped at the light by the triangle building (the middle of the block), and a young man pulled up in what would now be called a “muscle car” — a 1976 Mustang — revving the engine and shouting out the window. Grandma looked calmly over at the young man and asked what he wanted. He said that he could “clobber an old woman driving a big car,” and did she want to drag? Now, this was before seat belts, and her car was a new Cadillac with a V-8 engine with overdrive.
If there was one thing that my grandmother could not pass up, it was a challenge. I had a really bad feeling about this as she put her left foot on the brake and commenced revving her car to match the noise level of his car. I told her that the police station was just down the block, and we could go to jail for racing down the main street. But she just smiled sweetly at me and said, “Don’t worry. I have enough money to get us out.”
Our light was about to turn green, and both cars were growling and making little jumps forward. Now is a good time to point out that my grandmother was only 4’2”, and she sat on the Tulsa Yellow Pages so she could see out the windshield.
Well, the inevitable happened. The light turned green, both cars popped forward, and I looked briefly over at Grandma. She was leaning as far forward as she could get on the wheel and still reach the accelerator pedal. She had that car floored.
Both cars raced for about six blocks before anything happened, and then it happened with such quickness that it was hard to follow. The Mustang, seeing that he was not going to win this race quickly, cut in front of Grandma, and in her reflex to miss the Mustang, she hit the brake. Several things were set in motion like a ripple effect as she swerved the car and hit the brakes: The chokecherries started flying over the seat and hitting the front windshield, making it a sloppy red; I had a grip on the door handle for dear life; Grandma’s butt slid off her phone book as the car stopped, and she landed on the floorboard; and the car kept going forward as her foot slipped off the brake. I knew then that the Lord was coming to take us home.
The next thing I knew, the car was stopped, Grandma was out of the car, and she was chasing that Mustang down the street on foot. When she hit the floor, she must have clamped her hands down on the brake to stop the car because, Lord have mercy, we were stopped. That poor youngster did not have a chance. The next light turned red, and instead of jumping it, he stopped, and my tiny grandmother caught up with him.
She reached in the window, grabbed his ear, and started telling him the positive attitude he should have toward his elders, since she now recognized him as one of the leading citizens’ sons. She finally let him go and calmly got back into the car, and then we drove home. The next day, not only did she get a written apology from his dad, but also four baskets of chokecherries were delivered at the front door.
I asked her how she had gotten this done, as she had also been dragging the kid. She looked at me with those dark Cherokee eyes, cocked her head to the side and said, “I simply reminded his father by phone last night that I taught him how to treat his horses for the bloating when he had allowed them to overeat on his dad’s farm. I thought it was about time that his dad knew how he had learned the cure.”
She decided she had won the race by “default,” and we canned the chokecherries that day.
~Pamela Dawes-Tambornino
