CAR pt.4

The Community College across the street decided to do construction work on their main parking lot this week, the first week of primary classes. So the streets around me are crammed with traffic and honking horns and cars are parking as far as the eye can see.

Naturally, there was a wreck. Yesterday morning. No one was hurt but traffic was tied up in both directions on Ludlow Avenue.

I have a glorious history of car wrecks. One day last winter I was desperately in search of someone to fix a bad tire, on a cold, gray, snowy winter late afternoon. I turned left into a mechanics shop and became transfixed by the apparent lack of humans or lights on there. Then: the thing, the seconds, the harsh moment of realization that you have truly screwed up as you witness the pliability of time and perception. The impact happens as if in a dream and there is a nano-second of pause before you realize that this is, in fact, really happening.

I slammed into the left front fender panel of a young girl’s car. She went off the road and over a street sign which wedged itself between the white snow and the underside of her white vehicle. I got out and apologized profusely. She looked shocked. She called her boyfriend who she was to pick up down the street at the community college. The cops came. Before I left I handed her a twenty dollar bill and asked her to please go have dinner on me. I told her again how sorry I was for inflicting this on her a week before Christmas. She was unhurt. My bumper was smashed.

Two weeks later while driving my daughter and her friend to her mom’s house, I hit a intense patch of ice and slid into a fire hydrant, knocking the damn thing clean over.
Chloe’s friend Lily started to laugh and I squelched that immediately. I looked around the snow covered neighborhood and decided to move on. I parked in my ex-wife’s driveway while the girls went in to retrieve something. There was a knock on my window. I looked out to see a local policeman staring at me. I lowered the window.
“Knock something over?” he asked me. "Yeah, I was just trying to call the police," I lied.
He told me to report it to my insurance company and left smiling. The ice, the ice got me
off the hook.