The Righteous and the Unrighteous Alike

The day was hot, hotter than I'd expected, and I'd made the wrong call.

I-66 is often the wrong call.  It's a chaos-monster of a road, utterly unpredictable.  Oh, it'll always be jammed solid at rush hour, but one little twitch in the flow pattern of the universe, and it'll lock up completely.  Or, if there's another quantum-level twitch, it'll flow smooth and swift.  You just don't know.

I'd had that moment of decision, as I rolled back from seminary on my bike, the top-box filled with books from the library, research materials to fuel the next two weeks of my doctoral writing.  I could go left, onto Route 50, with its lights and stop and go.  Or I could risk Sixty Six.

I rolled the dice, gambled, and lost.

I knew I'd lost as I pulled down the exit ramp.  Exit ramps are fun, usually, an opportunity to let my bright little bike breathe deep into its willing cylinders, hooting out a rebel yell as I hit sixty in less than four seconds.  But this ramp had me slowing, and then notching into a stop and go line that stretched out as far as the eye could see.

It wasn't even bicycle pace.  A particularly motivated four year old could probably have kept up on their Big Wheel.  And the road was hot.  The sun had been bright all day, though clouds were coming in, and the ambient temps were in the mid-eighties.  Right there standing on the dark baked asphalt slab, surrounded by thousands of idling cars, it was much hotter.

I, of course, was in my trusty riding suit.  It's great protection, and in summer, it's perfectly cool.  So long as you're moving.  I'd unzipped the front zipper, and the vent zippers under my pits and across my back.  But we weren't moving.  I was becalmed.  I felt the sweat beading inside the helmet.  I felt the heat rising from the little motor idling between my legs.

This is no fun at all, I thought, among other unpastorly imprecations at myself for foolishly having risked such a random road.

A shadow fell across the road, and moments later, there was a sound of impact against my helmet.  "Spock," it went. "Spock," it went again, and there was cool moisture on my face.   Rain.  Raindrops make a percussive Nimoy onomatopoeia when they hit a helmet visor.  I looked up.  Huh.  The clouds didn't seem particularly like rain.

They were, though because then suddenly it was raining, tropically, heavy drops widely dispersed.

I could, I suppose, have received the rain as yet another annoyance.  Now it's rackafrackin' raining!  And I'm standing in the middle of an interstate.  On my bike.  Going nowhere. In the rain.

I chose to feel it differently.  Lord, it felt like a blessing.  I leaned back, and let the water strike my face and chest, tiny blows of grace on after another.  I felt the heat dissipate from the road, and from the air.

Rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike, I recalled.  How we receive that rain, though? That's up to us.

Death and Traffic

This morning, after the usual hurly burly of prepping kids to truck off to their respective Saturday activities, the big guy and I rolled the Prius onto the exit ramp leading onto the Beltway.  We were, as always, late, and as that Road of Despair rose into view, it was clear that things were not well.

The ramp and long access lane were clear, but the Beltway itself was locked up solid, a metal mass of bumper to bumper carbon-positive crawling.  I was about to mutter something unpastorly under my breath when I noticed the emergency vehicles, two fire engines and two ambulances, just a half click ahead.  The road was blocked, but our approach to the entrance was clear, and there would be no traffic once we got on the highway.

Which would have been cause for celebration, were it not for the fact that it was clearly a bad, bad accident.  We moved carefully by.

There were two cars.   Once was a silver Honda Civic, with no apparent damage.  Perhaps the first person on the scene.  The second was a Nissan Sentra, late 90s vintage.   It appeared to have gone into the retaining wall head first, and at considerable speed.  Around the  driver's side of the Sentra was a cluster of EMTs and firefighters.  They were talking amongst themselves, and some were looking into the vehicle.  They did not seem hurried.

As we passed, I saw that slumped on the steering wheel of the Sentra was a older man.  He was not moving.

I wondered, for I only glanced for an instant, if my mind had created that image, molding the folds of an airbag and a seat into a feared and expected shape.

"What did you see," I said to my son, who had looked longer.

"I saw a man with his head resting on the wheel, Dad.  He wasn't moving."

"That's because he was dead," I said, because it was clearly so.

After that, we talked, as a father should to his child when they first see death.  We talked about the man, and whether he might have had a family, and whether it was better if he did or he didn't.  We talked about dying, and what it's like to watch someone die.  We talked about how important it is to remember those who have passed, how important it is for the living to both mourn and to celebrate the lives that are forever a part of both us and Creation. 

There are times it is both hard and good to be the dad.

Going Slower

Yesterday, the usual Maryland traffic that impedes my progress as I go pick up my sons from the synagogue had snarled into an impressively static nightmare. Long lines of cars piled up along small suburban back roads, inching forward in small, sad increments. Had there been an accident? None could be seen. Was there construction? Nope.

Things just...weren't working.

As it turned out, that was the problem. An aging computer traffic management system in Montgomery County had gone down. It had been chugging along since it was installed in the Carter administration, and while it's slated for replacement, we're not there yet. The system is what makes the lights go in a logical sequence to maintain traffic flow. While all of the lights still worked, they didn't work together. It was every light for itself, cycling from green to yellow to red with no relation to what the other lights were doing. Without intentional management, the whole network of roads could no longer handle the volume of traffic, and things...as Chinua Achebe once put it..fell apart. What folks in Montgomery experienced was remarkably like the entropic snarl of Nigerian traffic, the legendary go-slows that sometimes gridlock the blighted city of Lagos for days.

Yesterday, we had a little taste of what I think will inevitably come to America. We have become, as a nation, utterly self-oriented. We don't see beyond our own individual interests, so we're not willing to work together or make any concessions for the common good. We are utterly oblivious to the complex infrastructure that is necessary to maintain a modern society, and snarl and grumble at the idea that we might have to pay one thin dime of our hard-earned money to maintain our roads and bridges. As those systems crumble and fade, our grumbling will grow louder...but as long as we maintain the conceit that you can have something without paying for it, we will continue to fade.