Well, I've been hit on my car--it could have been my leg. It could have been my head, I might have died!! But in this time of mortal peril any man would expect that his wife would come rushing to his side. (sorry for those of you haven't seen The Happiest Millionaire--the above will make no sense.)
Perspective in this picture, the tire you can see is about at the curb...meaning the tire you can't see is up on the lawn. It's funny because when I first saw my car, I didn't think anything had happened. Business as usual. Then I thought, I don't remember parking it at such a strange angle.
One look at the tire on the other side of the car--or the space where you normally see the tire--and it was clear all was not well in Denmark.
Following are some thoughts I wrote after said incident. (Fun side note: I won the award at camp this summer for best accident--filling a regular old van with diesel fuel. Oops. I indirectly won the award for best incident--cowboy Doug swallowing gas in attempt to siphon it out of the van. He was burping gasoline for a week.)
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Tonight I spent two hours waiting for a tow truck. Waiting for a tow truck in 30 degree weather, in a worthless heatless lifeless car, in the midst of snow storms. Waiting past the point of impatience and still waiting as pointless rage shivered in the seat next to me. I cannot think of a more loaded and irritating word than “waiting.” Waiting is almost an oxymoron of a verb. I don’t care if the thing coming is lovely or romantic or a sunburst of good luck—the point is it isn’t here yet and you can’t get your mind off it so the present is lost to the future. Waiting is needing time to pass but not caring how; it is wanting to skip over a chunk of life to land in some other here and now; it is reaching a greedy hand forward into a moment that doesn’t belong to you yet. (Understand that I am genetically impatient and the term “wait patiently” means nothing to me.)
Even though I just said all those things about waiting—which I still believe—I must clarify that waiting doesn’t mean the time you’re just passing through has to be meaningless. If it was meaningless, what a waste of time! Thus I spent two hours staring at the snow falling in front of distant street lamps, pondering the creepy sinewy web of causality and tracing a newly made web simultaneously. (Understand, if ‘sinewy’ does not work for you as a word choice because it is over-used, that I threw it in as a last resort. Apologies. Bounce it around the inside of your mouth and you will feel better.) How could I not think of causality while staring from a stranger’s car at my own car, perched on the neighbor’s lawn and roughed-up by a coward bully who couldn’t sign his name on his handiwork? If it hadn’t been snowing, if my wussy front-wheel drive hadn’t spun in circles driving home, if I hadn’t have parked my car at the base of a hill, again if it hadn’t been snowing still, if if if if my car hadn’t have been hit—I would be inside my house taking my place in the perfect winter scene complete with hot cocoa and crackling fire.
I love the way snowfall mutes the world. Snow is a rare tyrant in a world resigned to anarchy. I create the crime scene in my mind, without sound in deference to the snow. A car lurches along thirteenth avenue, if a car can lurch at ten miles per hour. The front tires hit a slick spot and the driver, a teenager no doubt with little experience driving in the snow, slams on the brakes. The whole car moves sideways towards the curb, in a motion you never expect to see cars make, driven by such force that there must be magnets lining the doors of each car. Then impact. The driver grazes off my car and continues on his way, dreamlike, the snow promising to cover his tracks. Not a sound but the snow, not a break in the car’s strange dance. Maybe the crunch of the metal was waiting too, for someone to hear it.
My need to analogize everything, to see the whole world as metaphor, exhausts me. Why can’t a car crash be just a car crash, instead of a still life lesson on impact and causality and the illusion of safety—avoiding one danger merely to position perfectly for another?
Well, that's my dad, and what a guy! I am sorry for the Christmas season culmination to be so near, because that only means it will soon be a whole year before it comes again. What logic. I do feel like the year cycle is oblong rather than circular, as though our lives orbit around the holidays, speeding up as we get closer, then slowing and practically creeping by until we round the corner and hurtle towards year-end again.
