Haiku 2023–207

before they happen

who knows which remembrances

will last forever?

— —

My family and I were traveling down a sparsely-traveled rural four-lane highway this past weekend when we happened upon three cars parked along the right side of the road. I noticed two men walking with a sense of purpose from the back of the line of cars to the front. Because of that, I failed to notice the vehicle that was at a dead stop in the middle of the lane that we were traveling in at seventy miles an hour. Fortunately for us, my wife wasn’t nearly as distracted as I was and yelled out a warning just before it was too late. I changed lanes so quickly that one of my daughters was thrown out of her seat to the other side of the car. She got a few bumps and bruises and part of the interior of the car was damaged, but we avoided what could have been a family disaster.

Two moments from that episode are seared into my brain. The first was the moment I first saw the car in the roadway. I can tell you it was dark-colored. I can also tell you it had its left blinker on but no brake lights or hazard lights. The car had something beneath it that didn’t belong there which was apparently why it was stopped in the middle of the road. All of this data, gathered in an instant, will be hard to remove from my memories. The second moment from this episode is hard to explain. In the middle of my quick lane change, I saw something that I could not have possibly seen. The highway we were traveling was constructed to interstate standards in the middle of the flatlands, so there were no sharp turns whatsoever. My mind, however, saw a T-intersection sitting right in front of me that I could only avoid by making a hard left turn. If I didn’t make the left turn, I was going to plow right into a bunch of state highway signs — signs, I feel compelled to point out, that weren’t actually there. It was that left turn that kept us from hurtling off of the highway and into the cornfields.

I’ve traveled the road we were traveling more times than I could possibly remember, in no small part because the dull tedium of the route makes it less than memorable. Who knew when I started the drive that I would create a memory that I think will last forever? But this happens a lot, doesn’t it? One moment you’re cruising through life not paying a whole lot of attention, discarding memories just as quickly as they’re made. The next? You make a memory that will last your entire life. This haiku attempts to capture that notion.