Considering all the countries we’ve traveled to where “safe driving” means constantly honking your horn while driving like a madman (I’m looking at you here Vietnam) it’s amazing that we’ve gone as long as we have without any sort of traffic incident.
Unfortunately, all that changed on May 30th while driving around Prague with some friends when an inattentive driver failed to notice that we (and every other car in front of us) had come to a complete stop. Thankfully everyone was traveling slowly at the time and despite some minor damage to the back of our friend’s car, everyone was fine.
Whenever there’s any kind of automobile accident, I can never help but think of the enthusiasm of the children in Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find (the capitalization is from the original story, not added by me).
As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of the car, shouting, “We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey’s wrath would not come down on her all at once. The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.
Bailey removed the cat from his neck with both hands and flung it out the window against the side of a pine tree. Then he got out of the car and started looking for the children’s mother. She was sitting against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the screaming baby, but she only had a cut down her face and a broken shoulder. “We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” the children screamed in a frenzy of delight.
I think it’s the description of the children screaming “in a frenzy of delight” that sticks with me.
In anycase, we’re fine and despite being a little late to that evening’s dinner, haven’t had any other trouble related to the accident.
Onward and upward!
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Onward and upward!