benja22

She grew up in a small Nebraska town where she met her husband to be. They ended up at Camp Phillips where he taught her how to drive in an old Model A Ford before they shipped him off to Europe to be a gunner in a B-17 flying missions over Germany.

She drove that Model A Ford to the post exchange once a week until he returned shortly after V.E. Day. She’d gotten to like the area so they settled down and began to raise a family.

She grew old.

She bought a buick.

This afternoon she fulfilled her destiny. The whole reason she was born, grew up, got married, learned to drive a car, and grew old.

She got in front of me when I was in a hurry to get home from work.

There was too much traffic. I could not pass. Perhaps, given the opportunity, I would have zoomed past her with my horn blaring. Probably not. I can’t bear to see the startled, frightened look.

I settled back, coming to grips with my fate as I rode her bumper. My evening is shot.

“Why is this old woman out driving?” I thought to myself as I fumed in bad temper.

Perhaps she’s returning from the hospice where she was visiting the man that taught her to drive so many years ago. She could care for him at home when it was just the Alzheimers. After the Diabetes took his legs she was no longer able.

She surely would not still be out so late, but she had to stop at her old dear friends house to set up her medications. The ones that won’t save her life but will help her be more comfortable till the end. She would forget to take them if they weren’t set up in the pill tray just so.

Why drive so slow? Was she deep in thought? Thinking of the talk she had with her daughter? The daughter that is to busy to drive her on her errands. How she said, in what she thought was a consoling way, the things she already knew. “Mom, Dad’s not going to get any better.”

Her daughter was so much different than her brother David. David was the thoughtful one. The gentle one. Normally, David would be driving her right now, but David died in Vietnam. Nothing is normal.

Father flew the flag on the porch for three weeks after they received the news. It came down the day they found out the cause of his death was a heroin overdose. Father was never the same after that, not really.

It was a secret that only they two shared, but now she was the only one that knew. It took the soul out of her husband. Took his heart, took his health and now, has taken his mind. It all goes back to that day doesn’t it? Yes.

And me? I’m a few minutes late getting home.

I don’t know that a word of this story is true. I imagined it all as I followed her. All I know for sure is that she is an old woman. She has a story to tell.

I eased my foot off the gas and gave her a little more room and found to my surprise that it was a lovely day for a drive.

If, by some odd chance, that old woman’s destiny really was to get in front of me, I wish to thank her. I hope in reality she (and her family) is having a most wonderful life.