The Accidental Embrace

One Moment More - Mindy Smith (mp3)
Leviathan Bound - Shearwater (mp3)

On Tuesdays, it is my parental duty to pick up one of my three chillens from her piano lessons and schlep her to soccer practice. Last Tuesday, I got delayed by a massive traffic pile-up on the Interstate mere miles from reaching my daughter.

Because my default mode is to push punctuality to its limit, any unexpected delay is certain to send me into an ulcerated hissy-fit, and this was no different. I hit the wheel, I murmur expletives about people who can’t drive or must not be in any friggin’ hurry or don’t believe in God, whatever might offer me some kind of balm for my own tension and misery.

As I approach an off-ramp and the salvation of a short-cut, I see it ahead of me. A dark blue Pontiac or an Oldsmobile in the second lane, its entire front end crushed like a Blutarsky Coke can, the hood taking the shape of a narrow A-frame roof, oil and other car fluids pooled up, as if the car were a gunshot victim slowly bleeding out on the asphalt.

The first thing that comes to mind is that the second car was missing. What about the car the driver rear-ended? Where did it go? As I’m looking around for it, my eyes catch a human form on the edge of the interstate. The form was actually two people, embracing one another so tightly it was as if they were forcing their bodies to become a single form. The woman was facing away from me, but you could see by the movement of her black track suit that her body was heaving and convulsing as she cried into this man’s chest. The man wore a white windbreaker, and his ballcap was backwards, and they embraced in front of an undamaged maroon truck some 15 yards from the destroyed automobile.

Logic and the scene suggested this was her boyfriend, husband, brother, a close loved one. Yet when I first saw them, and even now, I imagine them as strangers. I imagine that this man, having witnessed this terrible wreck, pulled over to help. He went to the car and patiently helped her out and over to the side of the road. Her legs wobbly, her brain in a jelly-fied shock, he held her strange arm and her strange hand and led her to safety.

Then, several minutes later -- long enough for me and my traffic to arrive on the scene, but before the police could make it -- I imagined that she begins to pull out of the fog of shock, realizing she had almost lost her life, possibly leaving behind children or family not to mention friends and an entire collection of the connections and accomplishments that make up one’s existence, and she began to weep uncontrollably. And this man takes her into his arms, not out of any remote selfishness, but rather because to have stopped to help and not have offered his chest and the comfort of his embrace would have meant failing her somehow.

A car behind me had to honk at me. I can’t remember a time I’d been so entranced by what amounted to rubbernecking.

After creeping past the scene and reaching my destination minutes later, I found myself so very grateful to have arrived that I gave both of my children the kind of overlong hugs that raise child eyebrows with that What’s up with Dad today? look, hugs with origins and motives you keep to yourself and hope one day your children will understand.

As my younger daughter pulled back to look up at me, I imagined the accident victim, looking up after several minutes of the kind of crying that exhausts every last calorie from the body, to thank this man. She wouldn’t even be ashamed of how things might look or care how uncomfortably close her body was to some strange man’s.

And, for just that one minute, she would fall in love with him. Not in any kind of shameful way, not in a way where she couldn’t go home to her significant other and hold him while grateful that the blood continued to pump through her body. She would love him the way humans are capable of truly loving one another, sans sex or romance or even gender. A love borne because we see a deep and powerful tenderness in one another, and because we can know in moments like these that life is precious and connections are precious and people, for all we do to fuck each other up, are amazing creatures full of inexplicable and sometimes unfathomable compassion.

This encounter occupied perhaps 120 seconds of my life. It could populate decades’ worth of Thanksgiving prayers.