I feel for you (but don't tell anybody)

Every now and then, my lovely bride reacts so strongly to something she sees on TV or hears on the radio that I'm left feeling like I might have spent too much of my time in the company of machines. It could be argued that this is less the cause for my apparent lack of empathy than a symptom, but the fact is that I often take as facts of life the same things that nearly reduce Turtle to tears. Driving down the road, I see a bag of trash that fell off the back of someone's truck; she sees someone's German shepherd, hit by a vehicle and left for dead. She hears about someone setting a cat on fire or sticking a dog in a laundromat washer and turning on the hot water and is furious; I hear the same story, and I'm disgusted but not surprised.

That's why I found some encouragement in a chance encounter I had during Monday's icy slog home from work. At a stop light,* I found myself behind a black Kia Spectra hanging off the back of a tow truck. The right rear taillight was obliterated, as were parts of the rear and quarter panels surrounding it. I could see that the hood was buckled and most of the right front of the car caved in. Ouch.

As I waited for the light to change, I also noticed that there was a sort of fuchsia-furred tribble-like thing hanging from the rearview mirror. Young woman, I inferred.

The temporary license tag on the back read "1-29". When I bought Dorian, my temp tags were only good for about three weeks, so I further concluded she'd only had the car for about a week and a half.

That sucks, I thought. On my mental movie screen, I saw the Spectra's driver headed to work at The Gap (probably because I was stopped alongside a mall at the time). She'd rather not, because she's nervous about having to drive her new car on the slick roads with all the maniacs, but she has to. She has a car payment now, and she can't get off work. Suddenly, brake lights flash in front of her, and she steps on her brakes—new, unfamiliar brakes that work much better than the ones on her old, clapped out Toyota. The car starts to skid, the rear end slowly swinging to the right.

WHAM! She slams into the rear of the car in front of her. The slide turns into a spin, slamming the right rear of her car into the side of a car in the next lane. What a tragic mess, I thought, giving the unfortunate Kia owner a mental pat on the shoulder.

As the light turned, some young chicklet with a cell phone pressed to her ear whipped her Honda Civic between the mashed Spectra and Dorian's front bumper. My imagined scenario with the Kia driver changed, and my newly-rediscovered empathy evaporated as quickly as you could say "Hello... State Farm?"

NOTE: Apparently, that last paragraph was just a bit too poetic to be clearly understood. Dorian is not wrecked. Quite dirty, still, but unharmed. My State Farm comment was made in reference to a future that might have been, if not for Dorian's four-wheel disc brakes and what's left of my aging reflexes.

* Some people call them "traffic lights", but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I say it's a duck.