K-57

How do I take this? Should I have made a difference today?

I'm still fighting a cold so maybe I'm not thinking properly this week but I saw it happen ...before it happened. What's worse is I had a chance to "make a difference" and I utterly failed. In fact, I kept walking yet I don't feel bad about it. Why not? I talk about how I can make a difference in lives and yet I let this big white company van back into someone else's red, private van. I could have stopped it and I didn't even try. Even after it happened I didn't do anything. The owner of the red van may not even know his van was hit today unless he knows every slight scratch on her vehicle. Why? I don't know.

Sure, you can argue that the driver of the white van had the responsibility to notice the other van parked in the street. All he had to do was look in his right rear-view mirror once as he was preparing to back up to his right. Obviously he didn't. Perhaps I distracted him.

OK, you can also make the case for the owner of the red van. I mean the garage door was open and it looked like there was plenty of room for the van in there. The driveway, with room for 4 or more parked vans, was two van lengths in front of the parking place. The only reason to be parked in that exact spot was to be parked in the shade of a rather large Florida Oak tree. It's a pet peeve of mine: Don't park in the street behind the driveway across the street, people don't always look. Bingo.

The sound of the crunch and skidding tires behind me was evident but didn't even phase or surprise me. The back end of the red van looked like it had moved at least 6 inches away from the center of the road, into the grass at the edge of the road a couple of inches. Only a small mark on the gray bumper told the story of what happened.

How could this whole encounter NOT be my fault? It's not really but I could have made a difference. I can think of exactly what I would normally say to the driver as I walked by. "Hey", I'd begin, "I don't know why people have to park their cars in the way of other driveways like that, perhaps they only wanted to park the van in the shade?" That's all I could have said and he would have been put on notice to watch the van in his way. (I think the white van was leaving from it's first visit to this house.)

These things happen every day and we can either get involved, perhaps making a difference, or we can keep walking and pretend it has nothing to do with us.

Life is all about choices to me and I suspect today I made the choice, for me, I don't like. Saying something might not have changed things but I would have felt better had I tried.

Choice.

Tag: Life

posted by Kev @ 4/21/2005 12:31:00 AM