I've found a way to cut two miles off the commute, reducing it to seventy-five miles, by getting off the interstate early and driving past one of the scarier housing projects in town. I'm not actually scared of the housing project, though. What worries me is that in thirty seconds I go from driving eighty miles per hour, as I have for over an hour, to driving twenty-five through a residential area with a lot of pedestrians and folks in cars who have a creative approach to driving. It's hard to change my driving reflexes that quickly. My eyes still want to focus a mile ahead, making it difficult to perceive the men walking their bicycles along the double yellow lines in the center of the road. And the guys on the sidewalk talking with them and who tend to step into the street without checking for oncoming cars. The sudden influx of ice cream trucks to the neighborhood (we've never had them before, and now there are like five that drive around constantly). Kids eating ice creams. And shouldn't that girl have more clothes on? It's just not that hot out. Yet.
Other distractions abound. For its grand opening, the new Food Market had hand-stenciled signs reading "GIT YO GRUB ON" which they only had out that one day. Now I constantly check for them because I still can't quite believe they were real. Spray-painted on the metal roll-up doors of another store is "RIP LO" (probably not a Nabokov reference). So who's Lo? And what happened?
Ocean Grocery, US Beauty, the police precinct. Walking in the street, a girl pushes a baby in a stroller and talks to the men sitting on the curb.
I roll across M Street and I'm almost home.
295 words | June 21, 2004 08:31 PM | Real true story