Teach me to go blogging about near-miss car accidents. Tempting fate, really, as I haven’t been in a car accident since I was a 16 year-old neoteric motorist and I backed up into some dumb bitch housewife in the parking lot of the King of Prussia mall. Then again, there was that decade of non-driving between the ages of 22-32 during which there was a spate of almost-collisions between my body and cars, my bike and cars, and my body and bikes. Life is dangerous, but why dwell on it?
I was on Route 2 West, headed to work after an invigorating morning at the gym where I was coerced into taking the 7:30am spinning class at my gym, which is tucked in the suburbs amid an upscale office park of global headquarters for various multi-national conglomerates. The median age of gym-goers is around 45, with the young corporate hotties intent on ideal physique balanced by the aging entrenched C-level folk intent on living forever. Normally I find a stationary bike in the corner and pour over the New York Times, but an ardently amiable acquaintance from the locker room insisted that I try out the morning spinning class. I’m totally jaded when it comes to spinning — I’ve spun with the best, so it’s hard for me to be impressed with a shrill woman in her 20s, wailing motivational epithets to a room full of aging, flappy upper-middle class white people while Salt n Pepa’s “Push It” blares at ear-bleeding decibels. For this, I give up a morning with Paul Krugman?
I was listening to Howard Stern on Sirius. Ever since college, I’ve gone through phases where for months at a time I’ll be a devout listener until Howard’s puerile immaturity starts to peeve me and I begin to wonder why I’m wasting my allotted time in this world listening to an egomaniac pontificate about his scatological and sexual obsessions. But Howard Stern has matured in recent years; his show is scads funnier now that he’s not hemmed in by the FCC, and his material seems more deliberate, more honed. Also…no Stuttering John! Ha-ha-hallelujah.
Route 2 is a highway peppered with traffic lights as it passes through Concord. I was stopped at a traffic light, fiddling with my touchscreen radio to find some music while Howard went to commercial, when my car gave a solid shook, not unlike when I throw it into 3rd gear instead of 1st gear and it disapprovingly stalls. I glance at my dashboard, wondering why I stalled, and see that I didn’t stall at all. In fact, my Jetta was very gently rear-ended… by another Jetta, no less.
As I said, I’ve never been in a car accident, so I didn’t know what to do. I jumped out of the car and examined my bumper. There was no structural damage, but I spied a scratch. The other driver, a young redhead in her early 20s, was saying “I don’t know what happened, it just started moving!” I ignored her; we were, after all, standing on a highway and traffic was zooming all around us. “Let’s pull over at that gas station,” I said, jumping in my car, memorizing her license plate number, and calling Mr. P all at once. It’s not easy to drive stick shift and talk on the phone at the same time. “Someone hit my car, what do I do?” I cried. He ordered me to get a whole slew of personal information– address, phone number, insurance, VIN, driver’s license number… I hung on him to shift into second gear.
Turns out, the girl who hit me was an old pro at this. She handed me a piece of paper with all her information on it. “Can I have your driver’s license number?” I asked her, and she looked at me like I was crazy.
“You don’t need that!” she exclaimed, jumping into her 2005 red Jetta and waving. A redhead in a red Jetta. She looked pretty wild. I bet she was texting when she hit me.
Later that day, the insurance company sent an appraiser to examine my bumper. He found a single scratch and valued the repairs at $250. I probably wouldn’t care except… the car only has 8k miles. I want to preserve its newness as long as possible.
(“May all your accidents be that small!” a wise woman remarked…)
