Late night visitors, dramatic exits and mindful driving...(A stream of thought post)

I'll be on the road visiting family and friends for the next couple of weeks. I will have little to no access to the internet during this time, so posts will be far and few between. Rest assured I will have lots to talk about in my return.

I had a couple of late night visitors last night. Two teenage boys got lost cutting through the woods, walking back from a friend's party late last night. Their cell phone had died and they had no idea on what street they had ended up. My neighbor had been less than helpful (they had rung their doorbell before mine). I couldn't let them inside to use the phone...and didn't want to hand them my cell phone...(bye bye cell phone). But I called their houses and left word of their situation to their parents and offered to call the police to help them where they needed to go. Sure enough the boys in blue showed up with one of the kid's brothers to take them home.

Ah, the memories it brought back of curfews and parties gone awry. Come to think of it, in High School James and I were the only ones with strict curfews...or had the earliest ones anyway. One of my most memorable exits of a party has to have been a cast party in Congers that my whole group of friends attended. James and I had the earlier curfew and left to go home. Driving at night, in an unfamiliar part of the county, I got into a terrible car accident that totaled my parents station wagon. Thankfully no one was seriously hurt, the driver of the other vehicle got stitches in his leg and I got the worst of it, shattering the drivers side window with my head. What a dynamic exit! And for some reason, after, no one wanted to ride with me so much. Go figure.

And that leads me to another memory of friends (you know who you are) who would give me directions, "right" or "left" when I was driving at night leading me into dead ends and culda sacs. I would just blindly trust their directions and oh how they would laugh, when I discovered they had led me into a dead end. They got me every time. :)

My friend Mike and I were the worst drivers I knew back in the day. It wasn't that we drove badly, the mechanics of our driving were fine. I won't speak for Mike, but my difficulty was focusing on the task at hand. My mind would start to wander and I would be thinking about someone or a situation, instead of keeping my mind on the road. I was a bit of a day dreamer and it took me a number of years to achieve the appropriate mindfulness needed to become a good driver.

Though a bit of a speed demon I am no longer a hazard on the road. :) My 8 hour road trip upstate this weekend will hopefully prove that.