And Now On A Serious Note...

Yesterday was really a nightmare. I'll tell you my end of it, but you'll soon see it was a nice dream compared to how other people's day went. Their lives were forever changed. Mine wasn't quite so much.

Without boring you with more of the same details: work sucked. The same damned malfunctioning chemistry analyzers. Only with new and different errors, and a baffled hotline representative. We left the wreckage of a bad morning behind us for the day shift to deal with.

You'd think most on-ramps to highways are long enough. Well, sometimes there just isn't enough room when you've got a UPS tandem truck who can't/won't get over into the other lane to let you on the highway. I drove a good way on the rumble-stripped shoulder before I could finally merge on, and then gunned it to get around his slow ass. The morning commute home is getting more and more wearing as time goes on. Sometimes I just don't want to face it. It seemed like there was an inordinate amount of heavy, speeding traffic yesterday morning. Usually I'm doing the speed limit, or maybe 5 over. And I'm one of the slowest vehicles on the road. It just gets on my nerves some days.

When you hear strange noises, sometimes you really need to pay attention. What was that weird loud 'whack!' that sounded sort of like a ladder falling over at the neighbors' house? Huh. No clue. There was no one over there. All completely dark. I shrugged and carried the first of two bags of groceries into the house, wanting to get out of the cold rain.

The noises that followed were far more recognizable: a hell of a lot of sirens and fire truck horns out on the main road. Damn, another car accident somewhere. I carried my second sack of groceries into the house.

An hour later, we found out it wasn't just somewhere, it was at the entrance to the subdivision. And had I spent one more minute in the grocery store, I might have been in it, or at least a close witness. I managed to drive out, but getting back home later was trickier. The first tough then apologetic sheriff was letting no traffic through whatsoever. I had to park the truck and walk home through cold wet grass and mud. Past a medical examiner vehicle. Past firemen and police. Past a tired-looking news photographer. And two horribly mangled vehicles.

Things are different these days. I remember when I was a kid, we knew at least the names of all the families in our small subdivision. We knew how many kids there were, how old they were, what their names were, and even played with most of them. We knew when stuff happened, just from listening to our parents. We might not have seen those people every day, but we all seemed a little closer then.

We're not so close today. There are people who we call our neighbors with whom we never speak while going about our lives. We're all busy. We value our privacy. We might wave if we see each other in a car, but that's it. So it took a while to figure out exactly who from our neighborhood had been killed in that accident.

Last night as I drove to work following my usual rigid routine, I saw every light was on in the house of the 17-year old girl who had been killed. A few more sparkles in my headlights on the shoulder of the road from broken auto glass. Those were the only things to catch my eye to tell anything was different.