The Empty Car

This morning as I was driving my kids to school, I turned onto a side street to find an SUV sitting smack in the middle of my lane, not moving, no brake lights. I slowly drove around it and realized there was no-one in the vehicle. Weird. I dropped my daughter at her destination and drove past the SUV again. This time I looked carefully to make sure that there was no driver slumped sideways whom I had missed the first time, but no, it was definitely empty.

I kept on with my appointed school rounds, but now my mind was racing through all the scenarios that might result in the empty vehicle in the middle of the street. Sudden illness, crime, alien abductions...you get the idea.

I drove past it one more time on my way home, having decided that if it was still there and empty I would drop into the police station and mention it, because it was certainly creating a hazard. This time, though, there was another vehicle and the SUV was open and they were working around it. So, a simple case of some kind of mechanical failure.

However, I found the whole experience somewhat weird and unsettling--my mom says due to my writer's imagination--and I was thinking how much we take for granted on a daily basis; that pretty much 99% of anything that happens to us on a given day will be within the range of "normal" as defined on any other day. When something outside that range of normality happens, it throws us off-balance. And it doesn't have to be something big.

A good thing for writers to keep in mind, I think.