A MORNING'S DOWNS AND UPS
by Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

It was a great morning when I started for work. The snow that blanketed the area only 48 hours earlier had almost disappeared, and the local forecasters were predicting a Spring-like day.

As is my custom, I stopped to buy a morning coffee and in pulling in line to get back onto the highway, I overshot the runway, as it were, and dinged the car in front of me.

My bumper had put a two- to six-inch line and crease in the bumper of the other car. The car I bumped was brand new. I'm not making this up: A few days earlier, my wife and I had paid off the loan on our 10-year-old commuter car and cancelled the collision insurance. Don't tell me about the ironies of life. Fortunately for me, my car was undamaged.

Anyway, I can recall the first time someone hit my first car. I had parked it in a school parking lot, and as I approached it on my return there was something about the left front fender that didn't seem right.

The closer I got, the sicker I felt. The fender had been pushed in and was covered with tiny little half-moon scratches. Literally, I began to think that someone had injured me. I had begun to think of the car as a part of my family, if not a part of me, and the thought that someone had harmed it made me want to throw up.

The person who hit my car eventually came and told me he'd accidentally backed into it and that his tailpipe had rattled those half-moons into the finish. He also eventually provided the payment for my car's repair.

The point is, I've been on the receiving end of fender-benders, and I know how such a little incident can upset one's day.

This week, I was on the giving end, and I think I was mildly surprised to see how being the bearer of a colliding object also made me physically upset.

The accident was so tiny that after the exchange of papers we were both on our way within five minutes, but I drove to the commuter train that morning slowly slipping into a funk.

It's difficult to admit one is a stupid driver, but I had to say I'd really been stupid that morning.

I couldn't find a seat on the train, either, so I rode between the cars, alone like a prisoner in solitary confinement with only the rattle of the train's wheels and windows echoing off the steel chamber.

With one's funk comes one's feeling of self-pity. There was no way I could shift blame to the other driver. She occupied a space I had invaded. Nevertheless, my psyche sought the self-excusing explanation.

It didn't work. I had been stupid. That is the only and final judgment. This funk was to be my daylong punishment.

Self-pity is a persistent and sinister evil, however. The more one mounts the self-defense and justifying rationalizations, honesty has a way of expanding the funk, and the deeper into a funk one descends, the more the glamour of self-pity presents itself. One always seems to think things can't get any worse. No addict ever faced so sly an enemy as self-pity and self-justification.

Then I got belted in my deflated though still puffing ego.

As I hurried toward the elevator that would take me to my office, a young man in a motorized wheel chair raced ahead of me. He managed to get the front wheel of his chair between the closing doors, but that was not enough to trigger the elevator's safety switch, and the doors pinched the front tire of his chair like a vice.

I arrived in time to slide my hand in and force the elevator doors open, though there was no real danger, and his wheel held the elevator for both of us.

His gratitude was copious and genuine.

We rode up together, and he exited the elevator before I did. As he powered out onto his floor, he thanked me again and added an ebullient, "Have a nice day."

The elevator carried me up the remaining floors, and, mysteriously, my morning funk lifted.

Copyright 1999 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.

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Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net