Thursday Morning

I slept in this morning - by mistake. My alarm usually goes off a couple of minutes before five A.M., and when it does, I usually swat the snooze button once and maybe once more, before reluctantly slinking out of bed by ten past five. But I don't remember any of that happening this morning. I think I forgot to set my alarm last night.

This morning, I rolled over, and without lifting my head off of my pillow, I squinted over at my clock. It read: 5:26. I remember smiling and closing my eyes, and feeling like, Oh good, it’s not time to get up yet. And after maybe a second and a half, I started thinking, “Wait a minute…”

I opened my eyes and squinted back at the clock, and I lay there trying to figure out what this meant. I was somehow trying to make sense of the concept that, while it wasn't time to get up, it appeared that it was also past my time to get up.

How could this be? Once I evaluated all the scenarios I could think of, that it wasn’t Saturday and that I wasn’t dreaming and that I wasn't in some alternate universe, it hit me that I better get moving. I flew out of bed and got dressed and did all of my usual morning stuff, and somehow, I managed to get out the door - only a minute or two later than when I usually leave for work.

Even though I wasn’t late, and even though I didn’t have any coffee, I had that over caffeinated feeling like I was way more jittery and nervous than I needed to I be. I was pretty sure that this was going to be a bad day.

About half way through my fifty minute commute, I go through this intersection in the center of a small town. It’s at this intersection that, if I'm going to, I get stuck behind RAV4. I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned RAV4 before, but RAV4 is in a heated competition with Grey Kia to see how slow it is humanly possible to drive and still be considered to be “moving”.

I go straight through this particular intersection and RAV4, if he or she is around, comes into it from the right. There have been times where I've had the green light and as I was going through through the intersection, RAV4 came coasting along and turned into the intersection right in front of me, maybe ten feet away from my bumper, never breaking pace (f you can call it that).

And that’s another thing about RAV4, he or she doesn’t believe in breaking. I'm pretty sure they don't even know that they have a break. I guess when you’re going that slow, it doesn’t seem necessary. Wherever they're going, they probably just roll up to the curb until the car stops.

But anyway, today, as I was approaching the intersection, the light was green and there, approaching the intersection on my right was RAV4. I don’t know how, but for once I managed to just barely sneak out in front of them. It was pretty amazing.

What was even more satisfying was that a couple of miles away from this intersection, there's a stretch where the road straightens out and the speed limit picks up considerably. When I got onto this stretch, I looked in my rear view mirror and I could see the headlights of RAV4 in the continually receding distance, and snaking behind RAV4 was a growing line of headlights, all bottle-necked behind them. That could have been me, I thought to myself.

Maybe the day wouldn’t be so bad after all, I figured. This more than made up for my oversleeping. I no longer felt jittery. And I almost didn’t mind that, off in the distance, I could see another line of cars up ahead, led by Grey Kia.