It’s funny what fate can do with such a beautiful day
I am driving through the San Fernando Valley listening to a Sarah Vaughan CD on a day scrubbed clean by the previous night’s storm. The morning sky is as blue as a lover’s eyes and the new growth of a late rain glistens like emeralds in the fierce winter sunlight. Van Gogh would have loved the colors.
For the moment -- dazzling day, new car, good music -- I am as happy as a baby in its mother’s arms, but contentment is not an enduring quality in my life. I was born in an earthquake and raised in a gale and continue to live a journalist’s life in a calamity of events that forbid any kind of eternal serenity. I am a writer, not a monk.
It is that condition of happenstance that explains the sudden appearance of an old Volvo in my path, making a left turn into a space that I will almost instantly occupy. We meet. There is a crashing sound as my Camry kisses the Volvo. It is not a big crash because, being a person of good reflexes, I am almost at a stop by the time my front end strikes his passenger side.
I take adversity as a dance with fate in which we are not always in step. In the spirit of acceptance, I emerge from my Camry as he emerges from his Volvo, looking angry. I am calmly digging out my driver’s license when he suddenly bellows, “Why did you hit me?” Good question.
I am about to reply in an equally truculent manner, “I did it, fool, because you turned in front of me and I couldn’t stop in time to avoid bumping your beat-up Volvo with my previously pristine Camry.”
But then I notice that Driver No. 2, as he will be known in the accident report, is a burly, muscular guy, and I say to myself that confrontation will not be wise in this case. He is a construction worker and I am, well, less physical than that, so instead I say something like, “I believe, sir, that you cut in front of me. I had the green light and ... “
He shouts, “No! Your light was red and now I’m late for work!”
It is an argument that neither of us will win, so I say, “Can I see your driver’s license, please, and proof of your automobile insurance?” I sound like a Highway Patrol commercial for safe driving, but under the circumstances, it is a wise road to travel.
He says, “No! I’m calling the police!”
I say, “The police won’t come unless there is blood on the pavement.” I am about to add that they are probably on a break at a Yum Yum Donut shop somewhere, but think better of it. He does not seem receptive to humor at this point.
He calls the police on his cellphone and discovers that I’m right, they will not come as long as there are no bodies littering the road and inhibiting the free flow of traffic. That’s important in L.A.
The man finally calms down and we exchange driver’s licenses and insurance cards. Meanwhile, his boss somehow hears of the accident and drives to the scene from a few blocks away, where they are working at a construction site. I think the boss informed him that he would not be fired for being late, which makes Driver No. 2 a lot happier. He is still insisting it is my fault, and I am still maintaining it is his fault, but it is more of a polite exchange between Tony Blair and the Queen of England than George W. Bush and the president of Iran. We are polite, but not about to hug.
My Camry looks like the cow with the crumpled horn, but it is drivable, so I roll down the street to Grand National Auto Body. Meanwhile, I call my insurance company and report the incident to a woman who is sympathetic but not tearful, if you know what I mean. She says, “What a day this has been,” in the exhausted tone of someone who also might have been tripped up by fate. What I think she means is that there had been a lot of accidents that day and she is tired of taking claims.
Cinelli picks me up and wants to know if I’m OK, which I am, and offers to buy me a cup of coffee, but I politely decline. “I’d buy you a drink,” she says, not meaning it, “but it’s too early for happy hour. Anyhow, you’re more morose than happy after a martini. For you, it’s the unhappy hour.”
So life goes on at its tick-tock pace, despite all that fate can do. We make it home and here I am proving that nothing is ever wasted by writing of the incident on a day so beguiling that one could not possibly imagine another unpleasant incident marring its resilience.
But if the engine of a 747 should crash through the ceiling, I will take that with a shrug too. Fate is not called fickle for nothing.
Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.
