what didn't happen

I couldn't make this up if I tried. I'm still trying to believe it all happened, even though I saw it happen. Even that is a question: I was sitting right there, I must've seen it happen. But the brain can't seem to find a visual record - the memory holds a moment of blindness, only full of sounds.

Back in Carlsbad again (another story). My sister and I are sitting on her porch. It's just about midnight. This is the best time to talk with her, as she gets ready for work on the night shift. The air is warm and humid, even now; the busy street she lives on is quiet for the moment. Suddenly there's a screech of tires - right in front of her house - and then a terrible CRASH! And CRASH! again, and AGAIN and AGAIN! I can't describe the volume - it fills the air. It sounds like a series of explosions are happening right in front of us, and then all the way down the block. They wrench the gut with the unmistakable crunch of metal twisting on metal. "Oh God," somebody yells (her? me?) "That was your jeep!" We can't see anything. There's the big tree in the yard, and all of our cars parked out front, and the noise itself overrides all the other senses. My sister's two friends burst out of the house. We're all running to the fence. Fully expecting to see flames, smoke, a whole block's worth of demolished vehicles. Please, no injured people...

But the block is mostly empty, suddenly quiet again. Although neighbors are starting to run out of their houses onto the street. "What happened?" comes from all sides. Sitting on the sidewalk at the end of the block is a Blazer with its smoking grill wrapped around a telephone pole. As we watch, a woman climbs out of the driver side, walks around the back of it, and disappears toward the alley. Everyone is too amazed, and too far away, to try and stop her.

"Your jeep..." everyone says. There's a crazy story here, and we all know it. My sister and jeeps go way back - 15 years or so. She's had almost half a dozen in her driving years. All older models, all well-loved, driven hard, kept up with sweat and grease and duct tape and baling wire. This one is unusual, and it represents her sudden return to freedom and choice, after 3 years with my grandmother. She happened onto it - just overhauled, spotless, great price - and took out a perhaps impulsive loan to bring it home. Four days ago. She's driven it twice. She just insured it yesterday. And followed an intuition, at the DMV, to lower her deductibles. And didn't follow an intuition, earlier this evening, to move it from the street into the driveway.

We creep around to its outer side, groaning. Imagining shards of glass, ripped metal. And it looks...almost normal. It has a flat tire. The bumper's disconnected, crooked. And though the drive shaft has been knocked loose by the impact, there's no body damage at all. We've called 911. Small town that this is, the police arrive in about 5 minutes. They're efficient, professional, helpful enough. We climb out of shock enough to survey the street. The other crashes, apparently, were a street sign being flattened, and the meeting with the telephone pole at the finale. And the jeep's tire blowing, as the Blazer clinked it right on one of its big, sturdy rims and then bounced off. Deflecting it from the neighbors' fence - and maybe, given the speed and trajectory, from their living room. Correcting the woman's progress on down to the end of the sidewalk where she has also, somehow, threaded between two mailboxes that are still standing.

Just inches behind the jeep sits my sister's friend's car, untouched. The normal guest parking spot is in front of the jeep (in the direction the Blazer was headed), but for some reason, she didn't park there when she arrived. She started to and changed her mind. I did the same, when I arrived here 8-10 minutes earlier from my brother's - I took the last space in the driveway. And the friend also didn't leave when she had thought about it, just a few minutes earlier. That's to say, either of us could easily have been right in that Blazer's path, with the shift of one offhand decision. Us, or our cars - and for either of us, a wreck right now would be a calamitous thing.

On closer inspection, it looks like the jeep might have suffered some frame damage. The next exciting installment, later today, will be when my sister calls her insurance company and learns whether she's just - unintentionally, unwillingly - made a double profit on her purchase. Which she will, if they deliver the kind of estimate they just might make on the damages.

What didn't happen. Just as important as everything that did. In how many other situations, just like in this one? That is my wondering drift of thought today...