The traffic going south on Connecticut Avenue was just awful one recent morning. The air was gray and misty but not quite rainy enough to justify running the wiper blades, so everyone was in a bit of a fog. Cars crept forward a few feet, then halted; stop and start, stop and start, in a rhythm as soporific as a lullaby. A woman happened to be stuck in that traffic, creeping and halting and feeling sleepy. Each time she pressed the brake pedal, she glanced at the newspaper spread on the passenger seat. She’d read a few lines, look up, ease off the brake, roll the car forward, depress the brake and look back down at the paper. This had been going on for what seemed a lifetime when she yawned and reached up to rub her eyes.
To explain what happened next, she assumed that the movement must have fitted perfectly with the stop-and-start cadence. As her head lifted up, once again her foot automatically lifted off the brake and the car began rolling forward — except this time she was rubbing her eyes rather than looking out of them.
BANG!
For a second, she didn’t know what had happened. Oh no — had she just struck the car in front of her? Or did the sudden feeling of impact come from her reflexes taking over at the last minute? Certainly, her foot was now pressing down on the brake just as hard as it could without her realizing that she’d engaged it.
A desperate moment passed in uncertainty, and then she saw the driver’s door open in the car ahead of her. Uh oh.
It was one of those moments of blank apprehension, when a person is suddenly aware that almost anything might happen. This is true of all moments, of course — none of us know from hour to hour what will happen — but that generalized ignorance sometimes occurs, as you might say, in concentrated form. As the car door opened, several scenarios flashed through the guilty driver’s mind.
Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe the other driver would glance at his bumper, shrug, wave and get back in his car.
He might be furious. He might come out screaming, berating and threatening bodily injury, as had happened to a person she knew who’d been caught in a chain of bumped cars and found herself beset by a madman.
The other driver might have felt the bump and thought, “Payday!” This had happened to someone else she knew. The victim in that case had climbed out of her car after a minor fender bender and had pretended to be suffering agonies of back pain. It was a frivolous claim — even the ambulance driver had rolled his eyes — but it resulted in months of arga warga with the insurance companies.
All this went through the head of the no-longer-sleepy driver. Her fate was entirely in the hands of a stranger, who she knew was entitled to express a certain amount of unhappiness.
The other driver got out rather heavily, as if depressed by having to deal with the experience of being banged into. She looked at her bumper. She sighed. She shrugged.
And she waved.
As the two cars resumed their rolling and stopping and rolling and stopping, one of the two drivers was almost singing with relief as she asked heaven to shower blessings on the fellow driver who was so kind as to forgive her.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
