THE MOVING VAN

For several weeks now, our silver van has been parked on the street, not exactly blocking the mailbox but not completely out of the way either. And I knew our post-woman was probably getting annoyed and I’d been wanting to move it but no one in our family knew the whereabouts of the key. Of course. Anyway, I wasn’t surprised yesterday when I found a polite little note on one mail piece that said, "Please move your van," and I really did intend to find the key and move it...right after supper last night and that load of laundry and...well, you know.

And yes, I had maybe, sort of, forgotten about the problem by later in the evening, when I asked who wanted to walk down to the corner with me and get some roasted corn that somebody was selling out of a cooker. And Rachel and Dave agreed to go, but by the time we got to the corner the roasted corn people were gone. So then we decided to head back the other direction and see if we could scare up the proprietor and check out the house I’ve rented for graduation. But the place was occupied so we didn’t get to do that either.

So then we headed back home, but when we were about eight blocks from our house, we heard this loud crash and then Rachel gets a text that says, "Dude, your van." And then some police cars and fire trucks and an ambulance raced by. So we started walking faster. And as it turned out, Rachel’s boyfriend’s sister’s boyfriend (this is a small town) had plowed into the back of our van, and it was up on the curb and quite a few feet from where it was parked before. The boy was okay but Dave had to do some pounding on the wheel well before he could move the van off the tree-lawn...after miraculously locating the key of course.

But the funny thing was that today, when I went to get the mail, I found a polite little note on one mail piece that said, "Thanks for moving your van."

I ate an entire box of Carr’s table water crackers for lunch today. And I don’t know why.