Looking Up

I do a great portion of the long-distance driving for our family. Not because I like to drive so much. I don't. I do prefer it to staring out the window at seemingly endless strips of asphalt. It gives me something to do. Again, I do not consider my talents as the operator of a passenger vehicle to be anything worth shouting about, but I do manage to keep the machine between the lines and the number of citations I have received in the last twenty-five years numbers somewhere in the low zero area.
Which can't necessarily be said of all the other drivers out there on the highways and byways. One of the ways my wife and I tend to pass time on road trips is to comment on the relative carelessness of the company we find out there. Signal lights, following distance, all that stuff that seemed to be such a bother back when I was younger and had a place to be. It never occurred to me that everyone else might also have a specific time and destination in mind. I could be the impediment to their arriving on time for dinner. Why don't I just get out of their way?
Still, it continues to amaze me that there aren't more collisions of all sorts, interstate, city streets, country roads. It requires a pretty solid set of sensory responses to pilot an automobile from point to point, and even though we seem to be interested in finding all manner of distractions to keep us from paying attention to the task at hand, most of us get from point to point without turning into a charred mass of twisted metal.
Good for us!
Sometimes, as the miles begin to stack upon themselves, I find myself wondering about a Jonathan Livingston Seagull approach to driving. That's when you have that momentary lapse of focus and the horn sounds behind you. No thump. No squealing tires. No broken glass. Just that near miss. What if that was just the way it translated into some new plane of reality, leaving behind the wreckage of what might have been and pressing the reset button once again. I almost fell asleep there. I should have checked my mirror. I shouldn't have looked down on the seat for my wallet. Oops. Never mind. Start again.
And this time, pay attention.