08 April 2007
Ice on the Roof
You know the feeling. You are driving down I-95, the dreary part of the multi-lane slab near Fort Meade. Some moron is blocking the fast lane, creeping past traffic. There are seven lanes of concrete going this way toward the imperial city, and he has to be in this one.
Your sleek imported chariot is thus pinned in the passing side by some other idiot in a big truck hauling an enormous recreational trailer, an affront to everything green, motoring along slightly below the speed of the rest of the traffic.
The unexpected Easter April snow on the towering trailer has melted slightly, forming an ice crust. The highway speed slowly begins to peal the crust away, throwing chunks high into the air, tumbling with graceful deliberation, and then crashing into the windshield.
Moron ahead eventually passes the great rig. I lower the driver's as I get abeam his window. You know precisely what I mean. I am staring daggers across the few feet of pavement rolling beneath, thinking about climbing out and throwing my cell phone at him.
I know I am going to be peering at the bottom of my windshield for the rest of the trip to see if little cracks are going to start creeping upward, and replacement will hit my wallet hard and cause me to rearrange my working schedule.
I want him to understand that his negligence has real consequences, but the idiot is looking straight ahead, probably listening to music of the Easter season to drown out the sounds of horns honking behind him. He has absolutely no clue whatsoever that he is spewing ice missiles on other civilians.
“Relax, Dad,” says my son, touching me gently on the elbow. “He doesn't know what he is doing.”
Son-of-a-bitch, I realized. My son was right. The guy was a rolling act of God, with no fucking idea at all what he was doing.
It was a case for Christian charity rather than road rage. I got by the moron ahead and did not side-swipe the idiot's truck in haste. I did not gesture or flash my lights as I had contemplated. I did wish there was a way to inform the idiot that it was important to look around.
I had a recent reminder that time is of the essence.
We happened to be coming back from Baltimore, which is a happening city these days. With a lot of folks on Easter Break, the inner harbor was packed with tourists, some of whom were dressed for the unexpected chill.
A pal of mine has had something unexpected come up. He is a couple years younger than I am, an old partner from days up in northern Michigan where we ski patrolled together. He had a great career in a family business out of Flint, and I followed my prospects elsewhere. For nearly forty years we have been in touch via the odd visit in some odd places.
The last time he had seen my son, it was at a luxurious dinner at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, and the time before that, he was a tiny child perched on my friend's massive shoulders.
He and his wife were not in Baltimore to see the revived Inner Harbor nightspots, or see the Aquarium or the historic ships tied up on the refurbished waterfront.
He had been experiencing some pain, and had it checked out. With the remarkable developments in scanning techniques, the doctors determined that he had rapid onset pancreatic cancer, as it turned out, something so malevolent and intrusive that it had spread to his liver in the time it had taken to arrange the travel from the Tri-City area in Michigan to the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center.
Whammo. Stage 1 to Stage 4B in a couple weeks.
They were staying at one of the fancy new Marriott hotels on the water. Cost did not appear to be much of an object, given the circumstances. There was a moment at the door to the suite in the fancy new Marriott hotel when we first saw each other that the years were all there. Once inside, though, they fell away quickly.
It was a good visit, since the Docs had successfully killed a nerve that had been radiating white-hot pain through my pal's gut for a month.
I was surprised to find that his wife had experienced a brain trauma a few years ago that had damaged her short-term memory. It added a bit to the chaos of our stay until we figured it out- and our visit actually was fun, though I had been dreading it.
My pal is a good man, and this is not fair.
He knows the odds and is no fool. There are some new tactics in the fight, and he is going to try them. Pain management is light years ahead of where it was just a few years ago. I told him I would be right there, every step of the way, though I think we both knew that was a lie.
I am not very good about having to deal with the inevitable, preferring genteel denial. I guess that is how we all deal with the great beyond, until it actually arrives on your doorstep. Just the way that idiot on I-95 dealt with the ice on his truck.
Ignore it, and turn up the radio.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com