Less Drama Please

DEAR GEORGE, Sometimes it seems like our lives have become completely bland and uneventful. I get up late, walk the dog, eat a bowl of Raisin Crunch, read the newspaper, scan my e-mails, revise a few poems, check MSNBC, have supper with Katja, watch Netflix, walk the dog one last time, and go back to bed. That’s it, one day after the next. Lately, though, things have picked up. Most notably, we set out for the grocery store on a dark, drizzly night last week. My windshield wipers were malfunctioning, and I had trouble seeing the road. Two blocks from home we came upon a cluster of emergency vehicles with blazing lights on both sides of the street. I slowed to a crawl and started driving between them. Suddenly I saw a police officer about eight feet directly in front of me, waving his arms frantically and with a horrified look on his face. I jammed on the brakes and came to a stop a few feet away from him. When I opened my window, another police officer was screaming at me. “Back up, back up, get out of here!” I did as commanded. However, I still feel jittery about the incident. I almost ran over a police officer; I got yelled at by another police officer; and I used bad judgment to try to drive through an emergency zone in the first place.

A few days later I went downstairs to give Iko his morning walk, and what did I find attached to our kitchen door but an Accident Report Form from an Officer Schneider. It listed all the information about another driver and his car, along with the date of the accident (that very morning) and the location (our home address). I couldn’t imagine what this was about since we’d just gotten up, much less had time to be driving anywhere and getting in an accident. I wondered if it was a prank. A while later we got a call from our gardener who had talked with Officer Schneider. It turned out that a young driver had tried to make a turn at our corner at a high rate of speed and lost control of his car. He knocked down the pedestrian walk light pole on our sidewalk, plowed through our garden, and crashed head-on into the sturdy honeysuckle tree that is a mere six inches from the front of our house. The police officer said that the car was completely totaled. The seat-belted driver amazingly escaped serious injury. According to the police officer, had it not been for our sturdy honeysuckle tree, the car would have demolished the front wall of our house and wound up in our living room.

We’ve been craving more excitement in our lives, but now I’m more into appreciating peace and serenity. Hopefully our lives will stay boring for a while. LOVE, DAVE