Hotel Sunrise
(Kids • )
They decided we should all somehow save daylight this morning, so when I woke upon the clouds tinged with red from a promised Little Rock sunrise, it turned out to be earlier than my body thought.
No free hotel breakfast for another hour and more importantly, no free hotel coffee yet.
Apparently I am addicted to coffee.
Nonetheless, someone saved me an hour, so here I am using it. Happy daylight savings. And lets drink a toast when the sun goes down about 6 p.m., because commuting home in the dark is all part of the mystery that saves our daylight.
I have children and an ex-wife in Little Rock. I stayed in a hotel this weekend to watch one of my sons play football for his high school team. They triumphed in a big way, and it was great to see.
Later we spent some time together, ate out and made small talk about life.
I also saw my oldest son, who’s going through hard times now. Recently he bought a car from my ex-mother-in-law, and has been making monthly payments to her for it.
But he lent it to the friend of a friend, just to go down the street, make a brief visit and drive back. The friend of a friend went down the highway many miles away, and drove it into two brick walls with concrete bears on top of them, guarding the entrance of a random driveway.
The friend of the friend was not hurt, but he was drunk or the equivalent, and was hauled off to jail. The car was totaled, and my son had to turn the title over to the towing company, which hauled it off, too.
Now he’s riding a bike to work, and still making payments on the car that can’t be driven. And the friend of the friend is not a likely source of money to replace the car, considering he hasn’t come up with bail and thus still is in jail.
If there’s a funny thing about this, it’s that I know exactly where the driveway-guarding bears used to be before my son’s car cut their concrete existance short.
They’re on a dead-end country road along which I have driven. And to my knowledge, this is the fourth set of bears to be destroyed by errant vehicular traffic. Which means they’ve really probably been destroyed even more times than that.
And it’s not like they’re sticking out in the road or anything, either. Not as far as anyone’s mailbox, for instance.
They’re just a prominent landmark. They catch the eye. And, evidently, they draw drunk drivers toward them like a magnet
Except for now, when they’ve been reduced to a pile of rubble.
→ B.Dunn, Oct 30, 2005, 08 14 am
