Sports Weekend & Learning to Drive

We had a satisfying sports weekend in the Valley. The Cardinals won big over the Bears with Larry Fitzgerald showing his old stuff by catching three passes for tds. And the other three teams in their division—the 49ers, the Rams, and the Seahawks—all lost. Hooray! The Phoenix Mercury looked like a team that might just repeat as WNBA champs. And the American ladies won the LPGA’s Solheim Cup in Germany. It was a most satisfying victory with a come-from-behind win of 8½ to 3½ points in Sunday’s singles matches. And Norway’s Suzanne Petterson will never hear the end of her decision to stick to the letter of the rules when she declared that Allison Lee should be penalized for picking up her ball before either Petterson or her partner Charlie Hull said they had conceded the putt. It was a grievous display of gamesmanship instead of sportsmanship, and most of the golfing community (American as well as European) will never forgive her for what she did. So Sunday’s win was doubly satisfying for me and other American golfers.

We just saw a quiet movie with only a little blue language and only a little explicit sex. That was a happy switch from some of the other movies lately. It was a two-person character analysis called Learning to Drive, with Sir Ben Kingsley as a Sikh cab driver/driving instructor, and Patricia Clarkson as a non-driving woman whose husband has just left her. The two of them bond during the many lessons Wendy (Clarkson) receives from the philosophical instructor Darwen Singh Toor (Kingsley). The film uses the driving lessons as a metaphor for how we learn to live, and both Wendy and Darwen need a life lesson, Wendy as a single woman who no longer needs a husband to give her life direction, and Darwen as a man trying to adjust to an arranged marriage with a woman from his village in India. There is a nice relationship between them that in a less truthful film might have brought them together and had them ride off (in a cab, of course) into the sunset. It was a nice, quiet way to spend the afternoon with these two nice, quiet people.