Stories don't have to be made up; sometimes they just fall
into my lap and it's my job to record them (fictional elaboration allowed). Wednesday
I was leaving Subway (the one near Walmart here in Hillsborough). Stopped at a stop
sign in the parking lot, looked both ways, and proceeded. Whiz! An aqua blue car barreled
toward me on the right, doing at least 45 mph (in a parking lot—okay, it's a
road that runs through a parking lot, but still…). I slammed on my brakes, narrowly
avoiding a collision, and as she flew by the woman driver honked her horn and gave
me the finger. The scowl on her face became a photo in my mind. I went on to my
next short errand, and was on my way again in about 10 minutes.
I turned left onto Highway 86 ("new" 86, as we
call it here). Crossed over I-85 where a sign on the overpass always gives me a
smile, "Tolerance Ends."
And came to a stop in a long line of cars before the entrance/exit ramps; soon realized that the holdup was an accident a little way ahead of me. One of the two cars involved was the aqua car that had raced by me in the Walmart parking lot. The driver stood by her car, apparently unhurt, assessing the awful damage to the front end: hood accordioned and popped open, a smashed-up mess. The other car had damage to the rear end. Several people stood there, and I assumed whoever was in the other car was okay, but I really don't know.
When I got home I told Jean-Michel about this, and in the telling said I felt oddly sorry for the woman who'd almost collided with me. She must have had a reason for going so fast in a parking lot, and for slamming into the rear end of another car just minutes later. An emergency? A bad day? A broken heart? A death in the family? Or just a distracted, out-of-sorts, angry woman using her accelerator to express her fury. I've been there, have driven that way, hell-bent on demonizing the highway in my rage. I'm so grateful to be an old woman whose anger switch is mostly turned off. And deeply thankful that I wasn't a split second faster leaving Subway.
