Morning is Broken

I was lying in bed, awake already, when I heard the crunch. Not the crunch that mattered, apparently, but the one that brought it all to a finish.

When I wandered out to the corner of Court and Union to see what had happened, the ambulance had already gotten there.

Now, I don't really know cars, but--smoking in the intersection with its small hood area crumpled and its engine lying in pieces beneath--was one of those large Soccer-Mom vehicles that looks like someone shoved a van and a station wagon together. There was also a red bumper in the middle of the intersection, but there was no red car anywhere to be seen.

The people gawking next to me couldn't believe that anyone would leave the scene of such an accident, let alone that the other car that had to have been involved in making the remaining car look like it looked could have gone anywhere to begin with after ending like it must have ended. The woman in the remaining crushed car--who was stepping out from behind her inflated airbags and onto the ambulance gurney under her own power--had the wide-eyed stare of someone whose brain was still computing whether to push it and run the yellow light; she had not caught up--perhaps she was still thinking about the dog.

There were people running from further down Court Street--I assumed that they--like me--wanted to see what had happened.

But, no; they had seen more than me and were relaying information from the source.

It took a while to figure out that I was watching the last act of a drama that had begun two blocks down at D'Amico's Coffee. That's where the red car with the missing bumper was, down there on the sidewalk with a tree and a parking meter under it. The entire two block stretch between here and there was littered with dents and old Italians saying things like, "Mamma Mia" just like they do in the movies.

The unfortunate dog, which had been tied to the tree while its master went in for an espresso, had been prised out from the bottom of the pile and carried home by the time I wandered down.

The women in front of D'Amico's were shaking their heads with their hands on their cheeks. One of them looked at the tree on the sidewalk before her and said, "he really loved that dog . . . "