When you're in a hurry to pack up and go, that's it. You're in a hurry. You don't have much time. Except when someone else is doing the packing, in which case you have to hurry up and wait. Unless you're waiting in a dream, in which case anything goes. And so it went, me and my dream of the morning, where I needed to head over to the ball game -- at a wildly misplaced Shea stadium, of all places -- to give somebody something. Something important, I gather. But the guy in charge of carrying stuff down to the car had a list and a stopwatch, and I was last on his list.
Not a good time to take any chances.
And that's when it happened. I somehow broke the connecting rod on my car, which was an odd cross between an old Saab and a new Volkswagen Beetle. It had the engine in the back, but it was a three-cylinder. And whatever I had done to the engine didn't really affect its functionality much, except that the middle piston tended to come up extra high on the top of its stroke and kick the trunk cover open an extra two or three feet.
You can't drive like that, can you?
And that was the dilemma. Whether to drive over to Shea stadium like that, with the trunk flipping everyone off, and risk missing the carrying-stuff-down-to-the-car (csdttc) guy, or whether to wait for the csdttc guy and not do whatever needed to be done over at the wildly misplaced Shea stadium.
All of which is probably some wildly misplaced metaphor for life. Do we sit around waiting for the improbable to happen, fearful of missing out on the unlikely? It's a tough choice to make, and yet we seem to make it all the time. I say "seem," of course, because it's not at all certain that this is what happens. We probably spend more time waiting for the impossible while worrying about the illogical.
And meanwhile, whatever it is we're driving while all this is happening has thrown a rod.
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