![]() Everybody else has probably decided this little black car is occupied by some armed nut with designs on their children, but who is now about to make an illegal U-turn to get back into traffic. Nobody except the big sedan and a few others witnessed what happened. No police car comes by, nobody stops to offer help, and I wouldn't have either. This story ends with one woman in a small black car backing sheepishly into the median so the stalled tide of northbound cars can start moving again. Then you find you're not much smarter than a kid trying to master the seesaw, and you are, appropriately, humbled. What you feel is a little like what you feel when somebody you love suddenly dies or that job that you counted on for a lifetime is whisked out from under you. It sometimes seems as though adulthood is one long game of believing you are in total control of your life and the events that shape it _ until you find you cannot steer your car down a huge ribbon of road. With this innovative technique you will fully immerse yourself in a world of memories, both joyous and heartbreaking, as your whole life flashes before your eyes. I have since bought myself a couple hundred dollars' worth of repairs to the wheels and the brakes, but you can tell that it has not done much for my peace of mind. Embark on an emotional first-person narrative adventure where you control the storyand affect its outcomeswith your real-life blinks. ![]() It was the power to bring the relentless highway, that ribbon of road running through the heart of the city, to a halt. Of course, I also say "you" to relieve myself of that shadowy burden called guilt: What if there had been an accident? I would have been responsible and had the rest of my life to remember what I had set in motion.īut the truth is, in that moment when I was so out of control, I suddenly had all the power in the world, even though I never meant to wield it. We've all driven too fast, too carelessly, as though we had a weapon in our hands, not a steering wheel. I started this out by talking about "you" because it could have been you. Its only redeeming element is universality. Because it happened to me, it counts in my book as a bad story. This is what reporters call a good story, full of drama and heart pounding, but it is only good if it doesn't happen to you. We would have been front-page news for a day and a couple of seconds of squawky radio bulletins repeated over and over by some traffic reporter safe in the sky in his helicopter. Several lives would have been changed forever, perhaps one or two ended for good. This is how I remember the moment, one morning last week, when I lost control of my car on the interstate near Busch Boulevard.īy all rights, I should have hit that big sedan, and the car behind it should have then slammed into the sedan, and on and on, like so many wheeled dominoes colliding. Her mouth is open in a soundless shout and her hands are drawn up to her face, palms open and fingers spread, to protect herself. The driver is an older man, and his face is blank with fear. You look up and a few feet from you, a sedan has stopped. The car goes where you command it, to the right, farther right, but too far, back into the lanes you started in, until you somehow stop, and your car is perpendicular to the northbound traffic.
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