Interruptions

I saw the man's body tumble across the roadway this morning when I drove to work. A dark blur, suddenly upright on the sidewalk before he was suddenly in the middle of the roadway, no more than a hundred meters ahead of me in the oncoming lane of traffic. Cars stopped, and somehow, the man was able to pull himself up and back on to the sidewalk, where the owner of a silver pickup truck had stopped, just above the sidewalk. As I drove by, I could see that he was white: I guess hitting a pedestrian with a truck would do that, but the victim was on his feet, and didn't seem to be injured. Traffic resumed as I passed, a sudden interruption in a number of people's days, but fortunately, not for one of those people.

As I waited, just moments later at the stoplight at the intersection of the street, I listened to the radio while trying not to think about what I could have seen. Soldiers from the Vermont National Guard had returned home: families gathered to meet them, and reunite. A wife of a soldier noted that in the audience, there were family members who had lost their loved ones in the conflict abroad, but they had shown up to greet the comrades of those lost. Longer interruptions in people's lives as the demands of the country supersede those of the family, some more significantly than others.

I try not to think about how easily life can be interrupted, and I can't help think about how satisfied I am with the way things have gone over the course of my life. I've yet to face any sort of issues like what I've seen and heard, today and beyond, and I am extremely thankful for that.