Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
Collision course
It’s no secret that every Monday morning, Rose and I get together for breakfast and then go to a meeting. We are regulars at the First Watch in Kirkwood, and have been for several years. We are not the only ones who have a routine – there is a big table reserved every Monday for a group of retired Kirkwood teachers who have been meeting for breakfast for at least 25 years. Their table looks like lots of fun because someone is always laughing about something over in their corner.
We have a favorite server and we sit in her section every time we go. She knows us so well that she can guess what we’re going to order. Yup, we are that predictable. They don’t even bring us menus anymore. Occasionally, if one of us is out of town, we invite a substitute and we still sit in Jenny’s section. Being at our First Watch reminds me of the opening song for that show, Cheers, “where everybody knows your name….”
But this blog is about how we got to First Watch yesterday. The routine was slightly different. Usually we meet at the restaurant, but yesterday Rose needed a ride from the car dealership in Kirkwood. I rushed to get ready at home, slurped one cup of brew, and headed out for Lou Fusz Toyota. The day had arrived for Rose’s Prius to have some front end repair work due to an unfortunate encounter with a concrete block, I think. The front of the car was in little folds of steel and plastic, and the Toyota emblem had been knocked out of its place. It appears that the emblem replacement part is one of the more expensive aspects of the whole repair. Go figure.
So I made my left turn on to the dealer’s street, a busy thoroughfare in the morning, and tried to get in the left turn lane. My way was blocked by a car with it’s blinkers on, stopped right in the middle of Manchester Road. “What the hell?”, was my first thought as I tried to squeeze in the turn lane behind the car. My second thought was “OMG!” because it was Rose’s car stopped in the middle of the road while she stood on the sidewalk in front of the dealership. When I saw her, she threw her arms in the air as if to say, “This is another fine mess..”, a rather famous line from old Laurel and Hardy films. She had a collision on her way to the Toyota collision center.
Now, Rose is usually a very careful driver. What she drives now is a replacement for the first Prius she got in 2007. Anyway, Rose made a sharp right turn on to Manchester and, in an effort to get into the left turn lane she caromed off the median, striking it with her left front wheel. The definition of “carom” is “any strike and rebound, as a ball striking a wall and glancing off.” That’s a fancy word for what she did in the early morning gloom. She struck the median at just the right angle to tear a hole in the tire and completely flatten it. She got out of the car and got to safety. I say that because mornings on Manchester are not pretty from a traffic standpoint and her car was literally in the middle of the road.
To make a long story short, after a brief discussion, she was able to trust that there was enough rubber around the rim, very slowly drive off the street and out of harm’s way, and get her car the remaining 50 feet to the collision center. She was in there for five minutes explaining what had happened. Then she got in my car and we arrived at First Watch for breakfast at 0800 hours, just like we do every Monday. Just another manic Monday, as the song goes.