It is unfortunate when you are driving home from a good (but long) day of work and suddenly realize that you are half way home with really no recollection of how you made it that far. Have you ever had that happen? So you pull yourself out of a sort of Zombie brain fog, and strive to take in the world around you, to be a conscious, alert, aware driver. It’s the kind of night when you wonder if something like a toothpick might actually help prop your eyes open, because you are yawning and yawning and very much would like to shut your eyes, just for a second. A second wouldn’t hurt, would it?
But no! You keep your eyes open, and make it thirty miles up the freeway to your exit, and now you are just a mile or so from home, and as you approach the train tracks, the lights are flashing, the guard rails are down. Which would normally be a slight annoyance, but also (hey! Looking on the bright side!) a chance to rest your eyes.
Except there does not appear to actually be a train.
Maybe you curse a little. Just to yourself and the blasted ringy dingy train alarm.
Because you are not really at your peak mental capacity at the moment. You managed to keep your eyes open for such a long time today. Like all day! And now you have to be on high alert, completely functioning, to make sure there truly is no train coming, so that you actually make it home and do not get smashed onto the train tracks, ruining your day and the train conductor’s, too.
So you stop. Look. Listen. (looking is difficult because it is dark).
No train on the left. No train on the right.
Deep breath. You check both directions, one more time, then accelerate, zoom across both sets of tracks, and triumphantly head down the hill, making it home without getting squished by a speeding locomotive.
All is right in the world again.
You are glad to be home at last, even though the fire went out and the boy forgot to bring in more wood (like you asked him to), but he did turn on the porch light, and close the curtains, and take care of the pets.
Time for bed. The best place to be to recharge, reset, and rest, so that hopefully, tomorrow, you can drive down the hill, work, and make it home with a little less stress and exhaustion.
It was a good day.
And so you say, at last, with gratitude, “Good night.”
(Incidentally, the next morning, when you are heading out again and taking the boy to school, the guard rails are still down, the lights are still flashing, the warning bells are still sounding, and there is a tired Union Pacific employee fiddling with a box at at the side of the tracks. So it is a good thing you went around when you did, because it would have been a very long wait.)
(Also? and finally? Your son tells you that the best thing to do in this situation would be to turn around and drive a few miles up the road to the next crossing area, which certainly would have been functioning normally. Perhaps he is right.)
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