Gathering Goat Eggs

The police report from my recent accident is a gold mine of amusement, most of it admittedly unintentional. Let's begin with this substantially accurate but hilarious police drawing of the incident, in which I appear to have been flattened by a 2-dimensional Borg spaceship. I told you he was going the wrong way.

The best detail comes from the information on Driver 1, though. Initially I felt kind of sorry for the him. No, really. He spoke very poor English, seemed terrified, and was, the last I saw of him before they strapped me to a backboard and shoved me in an ambulance, attempting to explain to a stolidly unsympathetic Prince Georges County cop why he couldn't produce a drivers' license or vehicle registration. I figured he was an undocumented alien, uninsured, unlicensed, and what guys like my husband call "judgement proof." In the civil liability sense, of course, not the sheep and goats sense.

There was one detail that didn't fit with this size-up, though. He was driving a relatively new domestic sedan, which had the legend "Metro Access" painted on the door. I didn't know what this meant, and figured it for some sort of black market private car service.

The police report explains it all, though. The driver did have a license, and was driving a vehicle registered to Logisticare, Inc. Logisticare is, I am amazed to learn, a nationwide provider of contract transport services, and operates in Maryland under the name Metro Access providing....wait for it....rides for people too disabled to use public transportation. That's right. I was disabled by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Logisticare/Metro Access have, so far, been completely unresponsive to my requests for information, insurance company details, etc. Nor have they offered any apology. I'm capable of being patient up to a point; it has been that slow holiday week between Christmas and New Years and I understand the offices are understaffed right now. Be prepared for boredom in the new year as I chronicle this idiotic tale to death, however.

I had just left the bank yesterday afternoon, and was walking back to my car across the parking lot, when I was struck by a car. The car hit me in the left side, just below the knee, whereupon I was thrown in the air and landed on my left arm. Luckily I didn't hit my head, lose consciousness, hurt my back or neck, or any of those other traumas that get you confined to a hospital overnight. I didn't even break anything, although the ligaments in my left knee now have the approximate tensile strength of overcooked linguini and I'm in a thigh-to-calf immobilizer splint for at least a week. What is actually more of a bummer is my left wrist, which is wrapped so tightly I can't play the harp, and it would probably hurt if I tried anyway.

So here I am two days before Christmas, with a filthy house and an unstocked refrigerator, and my husband's mother is coming for Christmas dinner. What's funny is that, if I hadn't hurt myself I'd be in an utter tizzy right now. I'd probably had gotten up early to be at the grocery store as soon as it opened so I could snag the best rib roast from the butcher, after which I'd haul heiney all over town finishing my shopping, come home and spend several hours scrubbing the kitchen floor and destroying the elaborate insect ecosystems that occupy all my dormer windows and ceiling corners, and generally making myself miserable. Now Rachel the trainee driver is going to ferry me to the grocery sometime later this afternoon, I'm not going to fuss about cleaning the house, and if we get a tough piece of beef for Christmas dinner I probably won't even notice.

This has nothing to do with intimations of mortality or having one's priorities set in order, although I will admit there were about five seconds when I was lying on the asphalt staring at a tire that was still rolling towards me that I suspected it might be all up. No, its just that I am forced to admit there's nothing I can do about this, and so am allowing myself to quit being such a fussbudget. So apparently the only way to turn Kathy away from Martha towards Mary is to run over her with a car. Well, I always have been kind of pigheaded.

I apologize for going away for so long without saying goodbye. I did not realize just how hectic this Christmas season was going to be. There are now three full-fledged musicians in the house, and the rehearsals and concerts have taken a staggering toll on our disposable time. However, the last engagement of the season (Anne's school concert) is tomorrow night, and I think everything should calm down for a bit now.

There hasn't been any story in the past month that's jumped out at me demanding to be blogged, either. Maybe my fatigue has made otherwise outrageous happenings seem bland, I don't know. But I just cannot motivate myself to fall in line behind Bill Donohue and demand a boycott of Target or Wal-Mart or whoever it is that's dissing the Christ Child this week according to the professional umbrage takers. If Mark Dayton's Mau-Mau Political Theater of the Absurd couldn't pry me away from Target, I don't think the Catholic League's going to be able to do it either.

My advice to everyone whose nose is out of joint because Land's End left the word Christmas out of their winter catalog: spend twenty hours a week from Halloween to the 4th Sunday of Advent either practicing medieval carols on a harp, driving a cellist to and from her Handel's Messiah rehearsals, listening to the drum part of Patapan and the cello part of Daughter of Zion playing at the same time, or sitting in a Beltway traffic jam late for a concert, and the fragrance will be off the Christmas Rose E'er Blooming sometime around Christus Rex.