Filling Gaps
The smile protruded into the middle of the road.
Something was amiss.
At the risk of irritating the driver behind me, I slowed to the pace of a woolly bear caterpillar when turning right onto HiLo Drive. Safety first!
Nope, not in somebody’s driveway, I said to myself. That Amazon van’s front end is stuck in the ditch.
I passed the flashing taillights at five miles per hour, slowed, stopped, turned on my Tahoe’s hazards, and looked both ways before opening my door and walking back to the carrier of Keurigs, books, toilet paper, and just about anything else money can buy.
At my approach, the driver rolled down the navy van’s window and said, “Hey!”
“Everything okay,” I asked. “Are you hurt?”
“Nah — I’m fine,” the driver replied, “Just waiting on a tow.”
“You’re the third one I’ve seen in a ditch between here and Moorland Boulevard. This first snow is dicey!”
“Yeah! It is! Just before I came here I stopped to check on a lady in an Escalade. She said she wasn’t going more than ten miles an hour and she just slid right off the road.”
“Anything I can do for you?” I asked.
“Nah — I’ll just wait. Tow trucks are busy today.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah — get wherever you’re going safely and thanks for stopping to check on me.”
“You bet. Take care of you!”
If the Amazon driver and I were jars of jam, his label might have had a picture of a smiling strawberry, mine…a smiling grape. Both smiles were missing a tooth, which made my smile grow even bigger. Seems to me we both recognize that when it comes to jam, the labels aren’t what we eat. We’re after the sweet stuff inside.
We create our destinies one conversation at a time. ~Lee Thayer
