4.4.00

Joan tells me that I slept through tragedy in the early hours. It's true I didn't hear anything unusual out on the street at 5:15 a.m. despite sleeping with my cranium to the street-side wall. Nor did I rouse myself out of bed before the debris was swept away or scavenged. Really, I had no sense that anything out of the ordinary occurred at all. She, on the other hand, sleeping deep into the backyard, heard a loud scraping noise at 5:15 a.m. that stirred her out to the living room window to peer, glassesless, upon a dark and empty street. A car was veering from view, but that was to be expected; otherwise all was motionless and silent. She went back to bed. At some point later in the morning, but before I got up, she departed here for somewhere out there and along the way encountered a neighbor and a police officer. The officer was sweeping up the details in the aftermath of a runaway vehicle that deposited a mother and child roadside and attacked no less than fourteen cars in its north-south rampage. Mother is hospitalized after leaping from the car with kid in tow; no word on the health of the child. Word on the street is the brakes failed. Last night, though coming home early, I was dismayed to find not one single parking spot on my block. Joan had even left her car straddling the driveway, which meant I couldn't use the driveway as a last option. I ended up east-west, but not too far out. Normally I park north-south in front of the house, the very row whereupon no car escaped unscraped.

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