Progress adjourned

I’m still working, mind you, and expect to be paid. I simply didn’t plan on writing any more formal columns. Sort of like how all the State House pols aren’t really taking the rest of the year off. They’re just not in formal session.

I was going to work the phones, meet people for lunch, put my feet up on the desk, and read the paper. You know, like, informal journalism.

Unlike taxpayers - who have a terrific sense of humor and put up with Beacon Hill “rules’’ that allegedly force the Legislature to adjourn after the third Wednesday of November in odd-numbered years - my boss is a humorless slave-driver. He ignored a perfectly reasonable argument, didn’t look up, and simply said, “Please leave my office.’’

If you’re keeping score at home, here are a few things that will have to wait until at least January, when, fresh from almost two months of informality, the overworked, underpaid members of the Legislature return to formally doing the state’s business.

First, and I’m sure you’ll find this shocking, the Great and General Court never got around to getting rid of the Suffolk County paid holidays of Evacuation Day and Bunker Hill Day. Patriots and historians all, they put this off for a day also known as the 12th of Never.

They didn’t have time, they said, to get to the education and criminal justice reform packages.

And, of course, they put off doing anything about retesting elderly drivers. There’s been a lot of jive thrown around as cover - that it’s unfair to single out the elderly, that setting an age for retesting is arbitrary. Blah blah blah.

But the truth is this: The elderly vote, dead people don’t, and politicians are more considerate of those who can both breathe and vote than those who do neither.

The lost opportunity to create something, anything, that would take physically impaired drivers off the road is particularly egregious because there had been a perfect storm of tragedy and public awareness, a consensus that something should be done.

“If they wouldn’t do it this year, when will they do it?’’ Jim Conley asked.

Good question. Jim Conley’s mother, Marie Conley, is one of those who might well be walking around today if the state that retests cars every year had the courage to at some point retest the people who drive them.

Marie Conley, a school crossing guard, was struck and killed outside a Dorchester elementary school by an 86-year-old driver who should have had to prove himself able to drive six years earlier, when he knocked a kid off a bicycle.

Marie Conley’s family forgave the driver, asked that he be spared jail time, and instead begged the Legislature to mandate some form of retesting.

“The elderly built this country, and I don’t want to needlessly take away anyone’s ability to drive, but at some point people’s reflexes aren’t what they used to be,’’ Jim Conley said. “Maybe instead of spending tax money on a footbridge to Gillette Stadium, the state could create some real transportation alternatives for the elderly, so they can go to the supermarket, or the doctor’s, or wherever they need to go. I just don’t think there’s enough politicians with the courage to risk alienating a group of people who vote.’’

Senator Brian Joyce, the Milton Democrat who has been pushing the idea of retesting for years, agrees.

“We had the votes in the Senate this year,’’ he said. “It got stuck in the House.’’

Joyce spoke what a lot of others are thinking: “I hope,’’ he said, “it doesn’t take another tragedy to get focused on this again.’’ But, of course, it will.

Before they called it a year, our elected representatives held a hearing last week on outlawing the use of bullhooks on elephants. In Massachusetts, no doubt, it will soon be safer to be an elephant in a circus than a kid in a crosswalk.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.