Scene Practice

A newly married couple and their three children, roughly ages one, three and five, stand near a crowded bird lagoon in a park. The mother carries an emptied bread bag in one hand, a child's wrist in her other. Passing on my bike I hear this exchange:
"Come, kids, we're going home," she says and glares deeply at her husband. "Your father wants to go home."
He gives an appalled and guilty sigh, begins to say, "No, I" but stops.
The children look back and reach their arms toward the ducks.

The next thing I see is a squirrel hesitating in the bike lane. It will happen one day, I will run over a squirrel. Or if not a squirrel, a cat, or if not a cat, a dog. My father, who loves animals and at one point owned a farm, has run over the following animals: owl, horse (horse?), alligator, snake, human on bike. For some of these examples it might be more appropriate to say "hit" or "crashed into" or "bumped" but I don't know which.

Twice I have been passenger when an automobile destroyed something living. The first was with my sister on the west bank of New Orleans. It was dark and she is a poor driver. I saw a black mass on the road. I think she saw it too but kept driving, perhaps forty miles per hour. Before we hit it, it lifted its head at the light.

Trying to be positive, I told her we finished what had already started.

The second instance I was with three friends on a drive to a festival during which we stopped for the night in Alabama at a grandparents' house. There was thick midsummer fog. I was sitting on the right rear side of a silver Toureg. The armadillo's shell bellowed a loud and succinct crack.

I do believe we have two options in situations like these. One is to cry and one is to laugh. Both are restorative and both have a place. It's a real treat to combine them.