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| Late afternoon light: Lake Maggiore, Italy |
Bruce's recovery from eye surgery is progressing nicely. He doesn't have to hold his head like a drinking bird stuck in mid-sip anymore and sight is, ever so slowly, returning to the eye.
Rerun
This is the week we were to have been in Portugal. As we didn't go for the very good reason that Bruce couldn't fly, I've got nothin'.
Instead I offer for your reading pleasure this story from the fall of 2008 I released under the title 40,000 Car Crashes.
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This Saturday a.m. was a perfect autumn morning. The sky was clear blue. The sun warmed the chill edge off the gentle breeze. The trees in Allan Gardens were a brilliant mix of gold, orange, red and stalwart unchanged green. I walked through the gardens on my way to shop on Church Street. I had company coming for lunch and was thinking happy thoughts about what I was going to buy to feed my guests. I had just come out of the dappled shade of the north west end of the park and was walking toward the intersection of Carlton and Jarvis Streets.
A small red car westbound on Carlton didn’t seem to notice the red light and T-boned at high speed a southbound grey van half-way through a left hand turn in the middle of the intersection. There was a horrible bang and a gigantic splash of pulverized car bits that caught the early morning sun and made a glorious aura around the shocking sight. Hit with such force, the grey van bounced out of the intersection and slammed into one or more cars on the eastbound side of Carlton.
“Oh my god!” I said, a time or two, not really adding much.
There were quite a few people at the intersection (mercifully, there were no pedestrians in the middle of the mayhem) most of whom had cell phones and were already calling for help. The rest were checking on the health of the people in the vehicles.
The fellow in the red car, the one who’d caused this mess, was stunned but unbloodied – his seat belt was on; his air bags deployed – and was sitting in the warm embrace of shock in his vehicle that was 50% shorter than it had been mere moments before. The front end wasn’t just smashed; it was practically atomized by the force of the collision.
There was nothing I could do, so I went and did my shopping.
Half a block from the terrible, horrible scene, the world was still bright and sunny and every person I saw was untouched, unconcerned and unaware of the awfulness less than 100 metres away.
I, on the other hand, was really badly shaken. As I walked away from the scene, I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t burst into tears. I felt I needed to hold my head. I heard sirens before I got to the store and I hoped the people in the vehicles would be OK.
Twenty minutes later, I returned home the way I came so I could walk back into the scene of the accident. All the people in the vehicles had been taken away. Just the ruined cars remained to snarl traffic and impede the progress of streetcars. Firemen had spread sand on the street to trap gasoline from someone’s shattered gas tank.
I wondered if there had been other witnesses who had really seen how it happened. All you have to do is look away for half a second and you miss things like this – they happen so fast. I really had seen the whole thing. At least I was very sure who had been at fault.
So, I approached a policeman and told him what I saw. I gave him my name and phone number. I was afraid I was going to have to stay, or “go downtown” like they do on the TV shows and not be able to feed my guests. But he just said thanks and let me go on my way.
I’ve seen at least 40,000 car crashes on TV and in movies and, so I’ve heard, your brain doesn’t really distinguish between the make believe and the real.
Yes it does.
Drive careful.
Thanks for reading!
Have a great week!
Karen
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