by Don White (Central Park, Burnaby)
The woman who had slammed into the back of my Toyota 4-Runner was not happy. “What were you doing stopped up there in the middle of the street?” she demanded.
“I was making a turn,” I said.
Sunlight bounced off her strawberry blond hair as she looked past me to the street where the impact had occurred. The debris of glass and the right half of my back bumper lay on the pavement no more than 500 yards from where we stood.
She sighed in consternation then whipping around, walked to her SUV, its front smashed and gnarled like my rear. “I’m going to call my husband,” she said adding with heavy condescension, “My car isn’t drivable.”
Her car is worth more than me and my physical well-being. I thought.
I felt sad. What had I done wrong?
Always when I have been involved, in fender benders, nothing like this incident, I greet the other drivers, as counseled not to do by attorneys, with, “I am so sorry,” and then, “Are you alright?”
This was quite different from my mother who, upon reaching my age, would chastise the highway patrol who having stopped her for speeding, for not having caught her speeding in the correct zone. “I was speeding three miles back, not here.”
Did it matter? I always wondered. Speeding is speeding.
Perhaps I always choose the high road because my mother came close to beating and whipping the fight out of me, her daughter.
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