oy, what a night!

Last night I woke up around 2 a.m. The night was still quiet, somewhere a kitty was snoozing away. Gradually I became aware of the distant sound of sirens approaching. A second later there's a terrible screech, the crash of metal on metal, and then a car zooming by. The sirens get louder, our bedroom lights up with red, blue, and white. Car doors slam and I hear an urgent voice: "Get out of the car! Get your hands in the air!"

They stopped whomever it was on the street just outside our house. We listened quietly to the scratch of their radios, their voices rising with the uneasy bravado of a crisis just avoided. I lay thinking for a long time how lucky we were to be in bed, holding each other close, only observers, and thank goodness the kitties were all inside, safe.

I thought about the last time I was woken up in the middle of the night to a loud bang. I was seventeen, and my mom and I rushed outside to find a giant boat of a station wagon in our driveway. My mom's little two door was punted ten feet ahead and had crashed into the fence. We called the police, they arrested the woman driver, who they told us was high as a kite. "She kept saying she was going on a trip," the officer said. "Yeah, I told her, you're on a trip all right."

It wasn't until the police had taken her away and prepared to impound the car when one of them spotted the boy crammed into the small space between the back seat and the passenger seat. I remember vaguely one of the officers gave him a snickers bar, but I'll never forget that wide-eyed face, not frightened, but wary.