African Daisy, Maybe?

You can always tell when it has begun to rain. I’m not speaking about seeing raindrops on the windows, because sometimes it’s too dark out or hearing them on the roof, because you really only hear them when there in a heavy downpour. I’m speaking of the sirens. You know that it has begun to rain when the sirens first windup. You also know that there has been another wreck on the highway. This was the case this morning. I got on the highway, heard the sirens, saw the flashing lights approaching me in my rearview mirror and then noticed the raindrops on the windshield. Why don’t people slow down when it rains?

Danger abounds all around us. Sometimes we court it, sometimes it appears unbidden. Frequently we skirt it, giving danger a wide berth. Sometimes we are drawn to it like a moth to a flame, edging ever closer to the precipice. It is funny though, but at those times is when one feels most alive. There is an alertness, a focused concentration that only danger can excite. With adrenalin coursing through our veins, we feel like supermen. This excitement is nothing more than a chemical reaction, a feeling that could more safely be experience by drinking a cup of coffee. Both drugs work well at jump starting the old heart rate.

National Public Radio’s daily diatribe of disasters is interrupted with the local traffic report. The fact that there’s a wreck on eastbound Forty at Big Bend and two lanes are blocked leads the report, but I already knew all that. Hopefully, just someone’s day has been ruined and not much more than that, like the rest of their life. A whole lot of other people are being inconvenienced now as they sit stuck in traffic, behind a red sea of tail lights, with not much else to do, except listen to the radio and watch the rain fall. It’s a Monday, a rainy Monday morning, what else would you have expected for such a day?