Friday, April 10, 2009

Death by Car

Many many years ago my brother came to visit me while I was in college. He had been there for a few days when we were all in the car and he had a confession to make. He explained to us that he had done something really bad and that he didn't know if he could even talk about it. How intriguing is that? WHAT could he have done? So he proceeded to tell us that on his drive from Spokane to Rexburg he had hit something? What had he hit that would have been so horrible? I had to ask if he had hit a PERSON, which of course he had not. My next question was if he had hit a horse? He then asked what kind of idiot hits a horse - well I have a roommate who actually hit TWO horses head on. She was driving to seminary (religion class before school) one early morning and only had one working headlight. She drove with her high beams on until a car came towards her and she turned down to 1 headlight. When she flipped her brights back on it was too late - two horses were RUNNING right towards her. She was lucky to have walked away uninjured - the horses were not so lucky. Back to my brother's story - once he stopped being completely shocked at the horse story - we continued guessing what he could have hit. A dog? A porcupine? A cat? Ahhhhh yes a cat. He hit a cat and for 3 days could only think about some little girl getting up in the morning and going outside to look for her cat and finding the aftermath. For three days he couldn't even TALK about that he had hit a cat.

I have been fortunate in the fact that I have never hit a cat, dog, horse or porcupine (I had a roommate who hit a porcupine too if you're wondering why I brought this up two times.) I have, however, been at fault for the death of several birds. I'm always amazed when the birds make it without being hit by the car but even MORE amazed when they don't fly fast enough. I hit a bird today that didn't fly HIGH enough. I've gotten over it though...I didn't even have to wait 3 days to blog about it.