Accidental Serenity, Japanese Gardens

A Letter to the Wretched Wanker Who Parked Next to Me

Dear Idiot Oversized Tank Driver:
I cannot believe that you parked next to me in the impossibly small space clearly marked for "compact cars only" in the Parking Deck of Death. I mean, I've only been in it three times now, and let's face it, there's hardly room in those spaces for a moped. So what were you thinking, you yuppie sleezeball, parking in that tiny, tiny space and effectively trapping me in the space next to the poor unsuspecting somewhat-used Camry? Because I had no way to get out. I mean, it was an Austin Powers moment times ten, but as careful as I was, I still scratched the Camry's bumper and mine. That's right, King Suburban. Your craptastic parking job forced me to hit a parked car in order to get out of my parking space - and I was there first. What was the problem? Couldn't put down your Starbucks long enough to figure out your behemoth car couldn't fit in the space? So then I stood there, wringing my hands and wondering what to do and left a hastily scrawled note for slightly-used Camry that said, "I hit your car. If you need to reach me, call me. My apologies."

And this is my note to you. I hate you, King Suburban. I was already having a vile, miserable day. Thanks for making it even better. Because of you, I cried on the way home. I hope you can live with that.

Have your insurance people call my insurance people.

Ash

As Meg pointed out recently, having the blog often presents a predicament over what parts of life to chronicle. And sometimes, leaving life events off the blog feels odd when you know they're what are coloring that moment in time. I've struggled over whether or not to blog about what happened to me last week, and if I did, how to blog about it. To tell the whole story or just the essence. In the end, for better or for worse, I decided to blog it because I couldn't seem to get past it to write something else.

On Wednesday, Mom and I drove to Atlanta to stay with Justin and Eva for the night so that they could go out on a date while we kept Dillon. The night before, their oven element had burnt out (read: caught on fire), and Eva asked me to ride along with her to get the replacement part. And it was a totally normal sunny hot June afternoon.

When we returned and pulled into the garage, Eva rolled to a stop, put it the car in park, and we heard a very strange noise. A noise of something bumping up under the car. The sort of noise you hear when a cardboard box is caught underneath the car. She turned off the motor. We both exited the car. And it was no longer a totally normal sunny hot June afternoon but a blur of panic and anguish and andrenaline.

Seizing underneath the car was Justin and Eva's cat, Booker. I could tell it was bad. I yelled at her to get Mom. He was under the middle part of the car, and I'm not even sure how I reached him - I have bruises on the top of my feet where I pressed them to the concrete trying to get him. And when I did get him into my arms, he stilled and was quiet and there was blood in his mouth and coming from his nose and his pupils dilated and I laid him, as gently as I could in my panic, in the backseat and got in the car.

I don't know how many times Eva backed from the garage and pulled forward trying to get angled out of the driveway before I said, "You can't drive." I ran inside to get Mom, told her I didn't think he was going to make it as she passed me.

Inside, I looked at my hands and forearms spattered with blood and blood down the leg of my jeans. I washed up and then I sat in the floor in front of Dillon in the Exersaucer and wept. When Justin called the house, I told him Booker had been hit by a car, for some reason, unable to confess that it was Eva and me. Cowardly, I know, but I had to hold it together while in sole possession of Dillon.

When they came back forty-five minutes later, Eva told me he had died instantly and that the vet said all his subsequent movement was reflex. We scrubbed the car and the garage and my pants and wondered over how this had happened.

I haven't been able to stop replaying it all in my head. To try and sort out what exactly did happen, examine the forensic evidence and reconstruct the incident. And in doing so, determine the million points along the timeline at which, if we'd only done x differently, it wouldn't have happened. But the truth is, it isn't possible, no matter how many ways you write the equation, to prevent all terrible things from happening. No matter how careful you are, how closely you look, how slowly you're going, how many times you've pulled in before, the fact that we just didn't see him. And on top of it all, between the lost dog and the car accident and now this, I am unable to shake the feeling that some terrible karmic energy is hovering over me and that somehow I'm to blame for making this happen.

Justin loved Booker so much. He entered their lives as a stray when Justin was in grad school, and they started to feed "Myrtle" who looked terribly dirty and mangy. Until one day, they took him to the vet and found out "he" wasn't a "she." Booker had a tiny meow that earned him the moniker Mr. Meepers and so much fuzz on his back legs that we used to say it looked like he was wearing chaps. And he loved to sit on Justin's stomach and knead and knead. He let Dillon pull his hair, sitting calmly while we extracted Dillon's fist from his fur. On the day he died, he'd been sunning on their back deck and played with the neighborhood kids.

Holding Booker after the accident, knowing that life was literally seeping out of him, was somehow intensely profound for me. I'm sure some people will read this post and think it ridiculous, with all that's going on in the world, that I was so shockingly affected by a dying cat. But somehow, it was a reminder that the innocent suffer for no apparent reason. That in an instant, something that brought great joy into this world was gone. That there is no rhyme or reason to it. That it's not anyone's fault. And perhaps worst of all, that something like this, some inexplicable terrible thing, will happen again. Sooner or later. And there's nothing I can do it stop it. Death creeps up; it lurks around the corner. Whether it comes for the pets or the people that you love, when death comes, you just have to live with it.

Things That Make You Go Whoops

I've been remiss in posting the last couple of days while I was in Atlanta with Justin, Eva and Dillon. I went to keep her company on Wednesday because Justin had to entertain clients late into the evening. Around 7:30, Eva and I headed for the car to dash out for dinner. We had been waiting on my cousin to show up when she called and cancelled due to work obligations. We had just a tiny window before Dillon was going to put on his fussy pants and demand his last bottle and bed. Did I mention we were voraciously hungry?

All of these things - the hunger, the lateness of the hour, the impending fussy pants episode, and the position of the garage in relation to the driveway - combined for a collossal oops. As we pulled out of the garage, Eva smashed into the back end of my Rav.

Now, some of you may know that Eva's a little bit notorious behind the wheel. For my grad school comrades, you may remember that I catalogued another famous car accident of hers in my short story "Car Crashes." And there's another story we like to tell about her driving when she had a tiny Ford Probe (totalled in aforementioned story accident) when I was on the way to her apartment with my boyfriend at the time. We were a little turned around when this silver bullet whipped around us, nearly clipping the corner of the car. And while my boyfriend was swearing at her, I said, "Follow her! That's Eva!"

The weird thing was that I knew it was going to happen. As the garage door lifted up and I spied the Rav behind us in the driveway, it just clicked in my head that she was going to hit it. But when she started easing out of the garage, I thought she saw it. When she cleared the trash can, she accelarated, and though I called out her name, she didn't have time to hit the breaks before she hit the car.

Bless her sweet heart. She felt so awful. And I felt so awful, looking at the bumper pulled away from the body and crumpled underneath. She couldn't stand the suspense and interrupted Justin's dinner meeting to tell her what she'd done. Between losing the dog last week and the accident this week, I'm doubtful that I'll be invited back to their house for awhile.