Very Odd Doings
The strangest thing happened today. I was driving, forever, or at least more than 100 miles to visit a site for work. The road I was on parallels a gorgeous river; radio reception was crappy, and the air was clean the way it gets when it just poured but it stopped. Everything was green and crisp and I could actually see through the air in a way that makes me feel surprisingly hopeful, and I really look at things that I wouldn’t normally notice. It gave me that road trip feeling, so I pulled over and bought a very large bag of potato chips (Tims, salt & vinegar) and a Sprite. I was listening to a crackley Joe Jackson singing “Fools in Love,” which added to the feeling of a road-trip time warp.
So anyway, I began reflecting on my life, which is generally a huge mistake, and this was no exception. But I’m driving along, literally in the middle of nowhere, thinking about Stuff, when ahead of me in the road are these two Korean women in long silk robes, which look to me like some sort of religious garb, but I can’t quite place it. Not bright colors, just a sedate gray/black flecked thing, down to the mid-calf. These women are waving madly, flagging me down. Picture them standing in the middle of the highway doing the arm motions of jumping jacks. My first thought is, shit, a crisis, I am not for this. I imagine a car rolled over in a ditch with some monk unconscious, and me, the first person on the scene. I hardly remember CPR, my cell phone isn’t getting reception, I'm feeling a little panicky and depressed already. The extent of my emergency preparedness involves potato chip crumbs and some old trail mix in a brown paper sack. Maybe a stretcher could fit in the back of the truck if I moved all of the crap back there, but that’s it, and to be honest, I really don’t like to see traumatic injury which is why I review building permits. There is very rarely blood in my line of work.
I stop when I get near them, and one of the women approaches the window. In what I guess you would call “broken English”, she says, “Start please?”, and points to a weed whacker that’s lying on the grass next to the road. I was quick to shift from relief at not having to deal with a dead person to “huh?” because, well, it just seemed a bit unusual to have this emergency with the weed whacker. Like, the freakin grass being tall around the mailbox is an emergency? Jeez, they should see my whole life. I'm suddenly annoyed. I want to go home and stand in the road, waving madly, flagging people down. When I get someone to stop, I'll bring them inside, show them the mounds of laundry, dishes, dust, unpaid bills, half-completed projects. I would just point, pretending I didn't speak the language. By the way, I hate weed whackers, and everything about them, including how freakin hard they are to start. “I can’t start them either,” I hastily reply. The woman walks to her companion and says something to her in what I think is Korean, something like, “the only traffic we get all day is some lame-ass woman with potato chip breath who doesn’t know how to start weed whackers either.”
I drive on, and then I’m completely consumed with regret. The possibility of adventure literally falls in my lap, and I missed out. I’m thinking of going back tomorrow to see how they’re doing.
