dispatches from dallas: flying objects may be closer than they appear

My cousin Allyson was driving down the highway this afternoon, taking her infant son to his swim class -- it's never too early you know -- when a piece of pipe flew off a truck and struck her windshield. She watched as it tumbled through the air and toward her car, almost as if in slow motion.

"It's coming right at me," she thought. And, indeed it did.

It hit her windshield, right at eye level on the driver's side, shattering at least part of the window and sending glass flying all over her, all over the car.

"Never mind," she called to tell me hours later, "that I'm never without my sunglasses, but today I wasn't wearing them. I'm surprised glass didn't get in my eyes."

"I'm surprised," I said, "that you're alive."

"Yeah, that's what the guy at the Volvo dealership said, too."

When it happened, she didn't swerve.

"You didn't swerve?!"

"Are you kidding? At 70 m.p.h, if you swerve, you die." And then with a hero's modesty, "If you were in my position, you would have done the same."

She didn't even slow down. She just checked to make sure she hadn't been impaled. "Because you know, I saw that Oprah where that woman fell on a microphone stand from her balcony and didn't even feel it at first." And then she calmly reached over, picked up her cell phone to call her husband and kept on driving.

"Pull over," Matt told her.

"Why," she wanted to know, exhibiting the detached awareness only ever displayed by the protagonists in Anne Tyler novels, "so I can sit by the side of the road? If I'm going to sit anywhere, it might as well be by the side of a pool." And so she continued on to her son's swim lesson, as if nothing more than an exceedingly large and disgusting bug had sullied her windshield.

Perfect composure.

Matt, on the other hand, broke laws to reach her side. He burned rubber, as it were. Ran stop lights, stop signs, cared not one whit for the rules around pedestrian crosswalks or the niceties of the right-of-way. I'm sure he never so much as gave the wave to any number of unnamed Samaritans he cut off in his single-minded goal to reach his wife and son.

When he arrived, only then did Allyson allow herself the much deserved hysterical sob fest.

I have three thoughts about this:

First, it absolutely melts my heart that Matt risked life, limb and the wrath of the Dallas Highway Patrol for his family. I know. That's what husbands do. But still. It reminds me of why I should perhaps look into finding one myself. A good one, of course. None of those second-hand models with a fishing channel addiction and erectile dysfunction. No, I'd like the kind that shows up -- and in record time, mind you -- when I need to break down. (I wonder, do they sell those on Ebay?)

Second, God is good. (Now, God. . . about that husband on Ebay. . . ?)

Third, people will do absolutely ANYTHING to get mentioned in this blog. Ally, really, a flushed fish or a rogue vacuum would have more than sufficed.