The casualness of the pivot feels odd.
I'm driving in my truck (what else is new) and I just got off the phone with 911. Pieces of red tail-light, blue and white glass, and shards of other debris are scattered across the highway. The cars have started driving again, which I'm happy about, because I was worried about a pile-up.
Driving along the two-lane highway with plumes of orange, yellow, and red lining the sides, beyond the green shrubbery, I came around a bend in the road to find cars in both lanes at a dead stop. Pumping my brakes, my eyes flitted up to the rearview mirror, begging the 18-wheeler not to plow into me. Something was certainly happening up ahead but I couldn't tell what. Across the median, on the other side of the highway, a black jeep pulled over. Leaving the hazards on, a guy with salt-n-pepper hair started jogging across the highway carrying a bright orange EMS bag. I had an identical bag to his right behind me and I'd been trying to figure out whether or not to pull over and do the same.
When we started rolling, albeit slowly, a white pickup came into view at the end of a pair of entrenched tire tracks through the guardrail dividing the median. On the other side of the road, the right shoulder of the lane I was in, a red SUV was rolled over completely upside down with its nose pointing back in the wrong direction.
One guy was leaning into the car through its broken windows. Another was by his side with an EMS bag. Salt-n-pepper was still jogging toward them. That's three, but none in gear. Two other guys stood by the white truck, one of which was on his phone. So I didn't stop—rather than clogging the scene, I dialed my phone, too.
I'm a firm believer in the department of redundancy department.
"Yep, we got it" the dispatcher said.
With an exhale, I returned to the podcast I was listening to. Taylor Tomlinson, the comedian, apparently grew up religious—which I didn't know—used to be engaged, and since came out as queer in her late twenties, both of which I also didn't know.
The casualness of the pivot from talking with a 911 dispatcher to listening to NPR's Modern Love is... well, it feels pretty odd.
* * *
How quickly do you snap-back to what you were doing?
onward.
For more on this daily column, read the backstory here. And if you know someone who'd appreciate this, pass it along.