On Driving

I don't write about driving because I do it for a living.

This post is about driving.

Sometimes, when I drive, I like to listen to the car and when I listen to the car, it gets me thinking about things, like the past and the future. Have you ever driven so long, you don't remember having driven the last 100 miles? It's not scary, although, maybe it should be. Have you ever driven without somewhere to go? Maybe that's what loneliness means.

Today, I stopped at a red light and had my windows down, when a kid came up next to me on his roller skates and grabbed my side view mirror. "Hello," he said. He must have been six or seven years old.

"Why aren't you in school?" I asked. But he didn't say anything and the light turned green.

"The light's green," I said, "you have to let go."

But he wouldn't let go. So I started to drive, very slowly, but the kid still held onto my side view mirror. "Hey kid," I said, "go home."

"They told me I wouldn't live past the age of four," he said and let go. I looked at him and noticed that he had a lazy eye and that I was looking at the wrong eye because when I looked at the other eye, it was looking right at me! I sped up and didn't look in my rear view mirror. I put up my windows.

Sometimes, when I'm in a car, I forget that the world outside is real. I am lost in thought. What I see through the windshield are images projected from some source behind me. It only takes a kid on rollerblades to wake me up from this kind of hazy state.

Or a deer I hit but didn't kill near a horse farm in Virginia early one August morning.

Or a tree branch that fell from an oak, onto the hood, after a thunderstorm.

Or an ice patch that directed me into a neighbor's picket fence.

Or a heavy fog. Lean forward. Squint. Adjust the lights. Because you can't quite make out what's coming next.