Come in out of the sun

We woke up to a bright sunny day, the first in a couple weeks. I took Brix to the dog park so he could run and stretch his chubby legs. It was getting late and quite brisk so only one shy German shepherd was there and she didn't want to share her ball. When she left we gave up on an impromptu play day. Tomorrow's forecast is for more rain...

Today is the last day of the 4th week of 2008. I’m keeping all my 2008 goals in mind but I’m lagging on almost every one. I’ve been on two artist’s dates so far, have cooked three meals, made one collage page, wrote two letters, filled 22 sketchbook pages, watched one movie, read one short story and three books. I started cleaning out the garage and have been futzing with some houseplants but am more behind on my exercise program than anything. The rest, well, I haven’t even started - no crosstitching, no continuing education, no Spanish, no recorder, no ATCs, no knitting and I haven’t been to Ireland. It’s another way of saying, just think of all I have to look forward to in the coming months!

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The prompt in the online autobiographical writing class was to describe an accident we've been in with about 200 words. So mine went like this:

“Ohmygod, we’re gonna crash.”

I saw it coming and I couldn’t do a dang thing about it. We were on an old green streetcar in San Francisco, grinding around the corner about to enter the Market Street tunnel in front of Bank of America. “We” being myself with my four-year old daughter perched on my lap.

I felt the wheels slip off the track. Later, what I remembered most clearly, was how time slowed, how there was time to plan, to organize for safety, to make it all turn out okay. I didn’t want Heather to chip her front teeth, her little baby teeth, on the seat rail in front of us. I put my hands over the bar so she’d knock into me with the jolt, not the shiny metal. I dug my elbows into her jacket to keep her from bouncing. I ducked my head into her back .... and waited. In just seconds there was all that time to prepare and to wait.

And then the streetcar careened to the left, like we were taking the short cut into the corner Safeway there, parking neatly in the lot with the regular cars. And we stopped. And took a deep breath and noticed that it had been rather gentle actually, and no one was hurt, almost like nothing momentous had happened, as though streetcars veering off their tracks happened all the time and we were used to it.

Passengers jumped up, passed through the open doors and sprinted to the intersection to wait for a bus. Heather had all her baby teeth and she wasn’t scared or crying, so we jumped down and waited too.