Traffic Calmed/Traffic Angry
Grammatically this sign implies that traffic here “has already been calmed”. How they do this is not mentioned. I am imagining this neighborhood does aerial spraying of the car population with sedatives, selective culling of the most aggressive of the automotive species by highly trained commandoes, or maybe they spike gasoline with something that makes the cars sluggish & not dangerous, (they are experimenting with sterilizing deer with bait set out in the woods, why not cars?).
And there are some cars in need of calming here too. After a delightful dinner with my insightful friend Kate, we were standing outside of Maxie’s Supper Club in the pleasant dusk. There was an intersection and train tracks next to Maxie’s, and a train was slowly making its way towards the intersection. Our stomachs were full of great food and we chatted along in a blissful post-dinner haze.
Suddenly we are jolted out of our conversation by a tremendous BANG.
A large green SUV has run a red light, and squarely t-boned a small red sports car. Glass and plastic bodywork scatter across the asphalt & for an instant, I think the train is going to hit the tangled cars, but they don’t slide onto the tracks. Wait staff pour out of Maxie’s calling 911 & waving a heavy-duty flashlight to direct traffic. A woman on a Vespa scooter, who was immediately behind the red car, pulls off the road, and then she runs to the window of the smashed sports car, where the driver is looking around, dazed, and he is holding his neck.
It’s at this moment when I have the sickening realization, that I KNOW the passenger of the red car, and the woman on the scooter. I know them quite well, actually. The anonymous suddenly becomes tremendously personal.
Luckily, in the final analysis, Ben was not seriously injured, I thank the dumb clockwork of chance also that Chris’s scooter was following Ben’s car, and not the other way around, or Chris would be dead/extremely seriously hurt…
Kate talked to the very upset driver of the green SUV, she was on the way to the hospital herself, her father is in critical condition, and she did not pay attention for a split second, or was distracted by the blazing headlight of the train, and did not see the red light.
There is something in the air right now, some ions of awful convergence. If folks have creative ideas of how to “calm traffic”, speak now!
Filed under: on the road
One Response to “Traffic Calmed/Traffic Angry”
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The SUV driver was quite successful in calming traffic with her actions! Most drivers on all sides of the road waited patiently for the accident to clear, and once able to, made their way around us quite cautiously. Accidents like this are an unfortunately successful reminder to motorists (and pedestrians) just how quickly lives can change or be lost when we are not paying attention to the very moment we are in.
If the SUV driver, Ben, myself, everyone else on the road (pedestrians and vehicles alike) could only focus on the present moment, these types of accidents would not occur. And that’s just the beginning of it. How much actual life do we all miss because we are somewhere else in our minds?
Lesson learned for me: Be here now. It’s the ONLY reality you have.