Persons in the Headlights

1-15-13  pm

When I came up over a hill where our friend and renter John Sondgeroth has his cattle operation, I was suddenly faced  with  4 headlights bursting into view.  Things had been going well up to that point on my day off.  I had tried my feet at x-country skiing, and had actually  some time finally to enjoy my rounds at the hospital, as I am enjoying the slower pace in Paw Paw.

But when a foolish person and a sane person are coming at you simultaneously, and the lights on the right side of the road are coming at me at much higher rate of speed than the one on the safe side, that would be a time to be afraid, very very afraid, I’m afraid.

Strange to say,  I wasn’t.  Not at all.  I was, I think, about as prudent as I could be, given the fact that there was a semi—a third set of lights—right behind me.  I understand it’s kind of hard to stop these.

The runner up of all this is that I was partially run off the road and onto an icy and extremely narrow strip of gravel—I could hear the crunching of the frozen rain under my tires—and somehow we all survived a blatant breaking of the law—and maybe of some laws of physics.  The semi kept a good longer distance between him and myself the rest of the way home; maybe he thought I was at fault.

I swear I was not texting, reading, eating, or even listening to music—tho I would highly recommend Iona’s “An Irish Day” , before or after such encounters of a close call kind.

My reaction to this, moments later, was much the same as when I was driving by myself in Mobile downtown one Christmas and came up to a short hill and was stopped behind a fancy white SUV when suddenly the driver got out of the car and loudly proclaimed that I had bumped him and damaged his bumper, to which he was pointing in mock dismay.  He obviously wanted me to get out of the car.  When I didn’t (but I did lock my doors, very quickly) his front seat  passenger , a man about a third size again larger than his partner , bearing a very unpleasant expression, got out and started to come towards me.

It was at that point that I backed up our Camry and zoomed out on the access road looking for a place to get back to the interstate and get home. Our perp on the scene threw up his hands as if to say to the crowd (it was on the edge of a crowded mega-store parking lot) , See, this guy hit me and now he’s running away from the crime scene.  I think he hoped his next victim will understand this  better.

Since there was no crime other than the scam these ungentle giants were trying to unload on me, I didn’t feel too guilty—and I called the police since I figure this is how these guys make their living and are likely to keep doing this—because a lot of people would have been too intimidated to just leave and would have yielded to their “sweet deal” to accept some ready cash in order to avoid involving insurance—and the police.  I give them a “B” for boldness—but then again we have created such a mountainous structure of institutionalized injustice, their boldness isn’t really that striking—they weren’t risking all that much on their turf.  I, however, with my Illinois license and my Green Bay logo on the back, seemed like someone that might be an easy mark.  What they did not know is that I am a huge fan of the late Reggie White…

That was about 2 years ago; and I figure these guys are still parking lot trolls at large.  Our prisons are too full to cram in many more scammers.  But the point is that I suprised myself because I was not in fear at that time either.  I was angry—but not so angry I couldn’t think, and think fast enough to find a way out.  But if I would create such a scene in my head, I would break out in a diaphoresis.  One never knows how one will react in a real crisis until it is over.  I once read of a man who survived an airliner crash, one of the few. And he recalled vividly many voices crying out the name, “Jesus Christ” but only in the, well, angry fashion numbingly repeated on TV.  The man himself cried out, “Jesus!” but in the opposite sense. (I am not saying this is why he survived, mind you)

   I think I would prefer going down and being on a first-name basis…

 

But did I think fast and accurately?  Ironically, I when I was looking for old flashlight bulbs this morning I came across and old rusty button  which declares, “Thinkfastoolate.”  Let me here and now give credit 100% to the Holy Spirit and to God for being quite literally my Presence of mind.

 

It may be the subject of another blog, but I would like to challenge my readers to think deeply as to whether my anger in these two situations was justifiable.  It didn’t last long and no, I didn’t   say the epithets some people long to hear me say.   But would you, dear readers, have been angry, too?    Make it a Walker Percy conundrum if you like, as in his last self-help book. “What goes through your mind as rockets converge on the Parthenon…”

  Maybe you have been in such situations already—if so it would be interesting to hear;   although as I wrote earlier today, feelings are common enough, like angry birds; but Grace can only come from Above And is still easily entreated.

 But facts are few and hard for us to find in spite of our conspicuous, pious, and powerful  desires to "know" them,  better yet control them, and form a Monoply  Board of Directors with the  “factoid" house of cards we far prefer to reality.  This cuts in all "humanoid" directions, mind us...