Rachel E. Watson

My dear friend Laurie bought me a Moleskine for my birthday last year. In the card accompanying her gift, she specifically said, "This is for all those brilliant thoughts you have while driving everywhere."


If this post is scattered, you can blame it on her for buying me the Moleskine ... or on me, I guess, for being too lazy to organize my thoughts before posting. :)

As I've already alluded to, I tend to be the type of person whose best thoughts come when I'm inconveniently doing something else, like driving.

Today, the thoughts were like popcorn in my mind ... just bursting disconnectedly out of nowhere on the route from work to Subway to home.

No. 1 -- Sitting at a (green) stoplight on the corner of College and Leonard: No one is moving. "What the heck is going on?" I wonder in a silent, irritated yell to myself. Suddenly an ambulance comes rushing past and the stopped traffic all begins to make sense.

First thought: Good thing some brilliant person formulated international road safety rules to dictate ambulance right-of-way ... otherwise, how would they ever make it through afternoon rush hour?

Follow-up thought: I wonder who is inside that ambulance? Did someone suffer a broken leg, a concussion, a bad fall, a heart attack? Here I was so impatient to make it through a green light, when someone inside that red and white truck quite possibly is fighting just to stay alive.

Let me tell you, there is nothing that resets my focus quite like the unexpected siren of an ambulance. All of a sudden, the minor frustrations of life seem so insignificant, you know?

No. 2 -- Minutes later, Leonard and Beltline: Listening to the radio. Today's news coverage is focusing mostly on the Supreme Court appointment hearings for Obama's hotly protested nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. Part of the sound byte captured a man who burst into the hearing yelling, "Baby killer! She's a baby killer! Don't let her on the bench!"

I sighed deeply. This is exactly the kind of behavior that gives conservatives the "extremist" label. Do you really think the panel will listen to you because you're yelling like a fool and carrying a sign attached to a big stick? No. They'll call the bailiff and throw you out, and then you'll just be another idiot sitting on the street corner, mad as a tantrum-throwing 2-year-old -- and what's more, you just got your new shorts dirty.

Disagreeing with Sotomayor's judicial record is fine ... but can you please find a rational -- and effective way to do it?

No. 3 -- I'm almost all the way home. Funny, I don't even remember much of the drive. I have to believe most people have similar experiences on the way home from work each day. "I know I got home somehow, but I don't really remember driving there."

"Oh well," we say, as we shrug and shut the doors to our 2,000-lb. hunks of steel we wielded all the way home ... so safely ... so consciously. :)

That thought scares me a little. "Am I playing it safe enough?" I ask myself. Then I turn the radio up a little louder ... and the Newsboys are singing "In the Hands of God." I laugh for a good 30 seconds about that, shake my head, and pay a little more attention to my driving the rest of the way home ... thankful for God's protection even when I'm not paying attention.

After all -- how can I honestly focus? It's Ticker Tape Tuesday. :)