Daily Dose in the Pod: I Stopped to See What Was At the Side of the Road. Would You Have?

The other day, I was taking a two-lane road through town, lined with homes on one side and businesses on the other. I passed the speciality market I shop at when I need nicer things, an affordable senior housing complex, and the demolition site of an elementary school being rebuilt. The tracks were up ahead.

This particular road was recently striped with bike lanes next to the curb, so I’m careful to stay within the lane designated for cars. I’m approaching the area where trees are heavy with their summer burdens and hang over the road a bit. Beneath them I spot a dark crumple of something that appears to have been dropped into the bike lane.

As I get within 30 feet of it, the darkness becomes purple. It looks to be a heap of fabric sturdy enough to hold shape. A drapery perhaps, or a puffy jacket.

I keep driving. Now mere feet away from the crumple, I come upon it and see the black soles of shoes, heels in the air, toes turned in toward each other. If these shoes did not have feet in them, they would fall to the ground.

This tells me there are feet in these shoes. This tells me this is a person.

All at once I go “Jesus!” and I brake, and dart my eyes to my rearview to see two cars bearing down on me. I can’t just screech to a stop without causing chaos for these drivers and perhaps injuring this person at the side of the road who perhaps is already injured or dead I don’t know.

I pull over into the bike lane just ahead of the crumpled person. The two cars pass me, oblivious I guess. I shift into first, turn off my ignition, grab my phone, check to see that it’s safe to exit, and walk toward the person while pulling out my phone. I now see black hair, white skin, and a purple dress. I hear her mumble. She’s alive, thank God.

“Are you alright!” I’m calling out, not shouting but making myself heard, as I pull up the keypad to dial 911.

She twists around to look at me. “Don’t take my picture.” Then she mumbles things I cannot comprehend.

“I’m not taking your picture I’m calling the authorities,” I tell her. Later I realize I should have said “I’m calling for help.”

“Don’t do that, I’m fine,” she says. “Well you’re lying here in the street,” I say.

She scrambles to her feet and comes toward me. She’s slender and taller than me. Her face is streaked with dirt as if repeatedly splashed by muddy water. Some of the mud looks like freckles. It might be freckles. Her dress is purple and black. Her shoes are chunky black boots. Her long black hair is twisted here and there and perhaps was pinned up but is now on its way back down. She looks like she might have been at a Steampunk convention. An unusual sight in my hometown.

She’s quite talkative. Her nose drips clear fluid. I tell her I was just concerned because she’d been lying in the road. She takes a step toward me then hugs me, and I let her. She tells me where she lives, describes how to turn here and there to get there. I tell her my name and she tells me hers, and how to spell it. I say it back to her, but I get a vowel sound wrong and she corrects me. “It’s an anagram,” she tells me. I think she means palindrome, but it’s neither.

I’m confident [NAME] is alive and relatively fine. We say goodbye. I watch her walk off down the sidewalk.

I never called 911 or anyone else. Maybe I should have. What would you have done if you’d seen what I saw on my drive home?

xo

🤗 Here’s a hug for anyone who has an inclination to run toward the problem rather than away.

🗞️ The Daily Dose is a new facet of the Pod where I’m devoted to a new discipline of writing almost daily on whatever subject stirs my heart and mind. Prior topics are my thoughts on getting alopecia (here), on why I’m so competitive (here), the Biden v. Trump debate (here), letting the elderly be who they are (here), my difficult encounter with the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC when I was a congressional candidate (here), and the progress of the 20th Century being thrown into the dumpster by conservatives (here).

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