A few seconds either way

Depending on how long it takes me to pull up my socks in the morning, I'm always leaving the house within two minutes of the same time every day. I cannot stand tardiness.

But today, right around the corner from work, I came upon a traffic accident that had just occurred. A guy had run his car off the road into a roadside ditch (why they even have roadside ditches, I'll never know) and a mom with a van load of kids had pulled over. I would have stopped, but a police was just pulling up on the scene, so I kept going. And on the way to work, I saw another police car and an ambulance apparently heading toward the scene.

It didn't appear that the accident itself was bad enough to have injured the man all that badly. He was still behind the wheel of the car when I drove past, so maybe there was some other medical emergency that precipitated the accident in the first place.

As for the mom and the kids, I don't think they were involved other than to be Good Samaritans. But of course the mind races, and I got to thinking: if I hadn't stopped to ask Peggy to mail a card for me this morning, and then come back into the house to tell her I saw a rabbit running across the yard, I might have been there when it happened. Who knows?

I always think about a girl named Marion, a year behind me in high school. About ten years out of high school, Marion had married and moved up to Carroll County, and was imminently expecting a child that night when she was driving down Falls Road into Baltimore City when some yahoos playing with a gun (attn: National Board of Redundancy Board! He said "yahoos playing with a gun"!) fired the gun, sending the bullet through the night air, and into Marion's head as she drove along.

Ignorant of the laws of nature and man, the young men involved claimed not to have reasoned past the point where " the gun go BOOM! and we go WHEEE! with glee!", a landmark defense that Bush's attorneys just might wish to bookmark for the future. It didn't matter. Marion and the baby were both dead.

Of course, thoughts ran along the lines of "What if the last light she had come upon had been red; she wouldn't have been there when the bullet came along!" A second - half a second - either way, and they would both have lived to greet another dawn.

Of course, we assume that these young men were members of a well-regulated militia, which as any Constitutional scholar or drunken hunter can tell you is necessary to the security of a free state, so what was happening that Thursday evening in a park along Falls Road was certainly some sort of bivouac or ComServPac Eagle Squadron Second Platoon Doomsday Brigade NinComPoop elaborate military drill, exercise or practice session. No gun owner would be so irresponsible as to simply fire a gun into the night air.

But poet Alan Seeger (who only lived to be 28 himself) wrote "I have a rendezvous with death, at some disputed barricade." After we do all we can to push that barricade far into the future, after our best efforts, we just never know when we'll hit it. We live and learn and strive, and why not try living happily, learning to love and striving to make others happy? It might not move the barricade at all, but just maybe it will give us something nice to look back on when that great Summing Up day rolls around.