a moment in the day: bicycle

Driving home from work through the drizzling dusk, I'm following a bicycle. He's riding on the right side of the road, where a bicycle lane would be if a bicycle lane were there, and I could go around him if there weren't a steady stream of oncoming traffic, but there is. So, I creep along behind the bicycle, maybe fifteen miles per hour. I don't mind. I'll get where I'm going when where I'm going is where I've got. We pull up to a red light and wait while the traffic crosses, bicyclist in front, me behind. When the light changes, the bicyclist doesn't move. A second goes by, another. The green car facing us on the other side of the street starts into the intersection but the bicyclist waits.

Now, fast, from the right, a car plows through the red light and just about into the green car. Both cars slam to a stop. The car that ran the red light was going fast enough that when it stops, it's with a great jolt that rocks it back on its tires. For a second no one moves. The car that ran the red light, sitting stopped in the middle of the intersection right in front of me, its nose practically up against the other car's driver's side door, is a white Scion, the mirror image of my car.

Had that bicycle not hesitated, it would have been very bad.

Green car drives through, white Scion drives through, bicyclist and me, we ride through. The street is shiny with rain. Bicycle, how did you know? I didn't see you even turn your head. How did you know?

We creep up to a four-way stop. The bicyclist stops, then starts ahead, then does a little bobble-swerve to a halt as another car, a yellow old-fashioned station wagon, pulling to a stop where the cross street comes in from the right, rolls a tad too far into the intersection.

I felt it too, that jolt when the station wagon rolled forward. Coming from exactly the same direction as the white Scion that ran the light. A zing down to my fingertips on the wheel.

For just a moment, the bicyclist's foot is on the ground, and then he's getting back on the bike to continue on. As he rides through, the guy in the yellow station wagon, scraggly beard and puff of light brown hair, throws his hands up in the air at the bicyclist like, what are you freaking out for, you little twerp.

People and their need to judge.

Yellow station wagon, get your hands down. You don't know everything. You don't know anything at all.