Intervention

I do a lot of driving because I live so far away from where I work and because I am the only employee that lives in Sarasota or "in town" as they Myakkans would say, I usually am the one that runs errands.

Last Friday afternoon I was doing just that.  I had left work early as I had an appointment to have some blood drawn for medication level testing.  My first stop was the accountant's office to drop off June's books so that they could work on them.  I had run my distance and I was passing the baton to them.

It was a typical summer afternoon with plenty of rain, thunder, and lightening.  For those that have never experienced one of Florida's summer afternoon storms, they are torrential.  There is no soft pitter-patter of tiny droplets that dance from the sky and land gently to the ground.  These are fierce globules of water that have formed gangs and race to the ground to pummel it.  It comes down in buckets; it comes down in sheets.  A film of water forms on the surface of roads daring drivers to hydroplane.  It was raining like this on my way to the accountant's office.  I arrived there safely, said hello, dropped off the thumb drive, and left.

When an opening in the traffic allowed, I pulled back into the 3-lane road and found a good spot in the middle lane.  It wasn't raining as hard as it had been just a few minutes ago and I could comfortably set my wipers to lazy intermittent.   I saw up ahead that the traffic in the right lane stopped to leave a space for a driver to pull into.  Instead, this crazy man who apparently does not cherish life whipped out from in between the cars and drove across my lane and the left lane of oncoming traffic. As I looked in my rear view mirror, all I had time to do was break hard and hope that I wasn't rear-ended .  That shouldn't have been my only concern because suddenly to my left I saw a white car that must have been going faster than me and unlike me didn't have the warning of a possible situation.  As I watched the white car slide closer and closer to my beloved Taurus, I was waiting to hear metal against metal, to feel my car shudder as it was hit.  Instead I saw an incredible thing.

Are you familiar with marshmallow fluff?  Here's a picture of jar of it and next to that is a picture of what mother's in the 1960s used to consider a healthy sandwich.

 

See how the fluff is oozing out of the sandwich?  That is what I saw in between the white car and me.  It was like there was fluff smashed between our two cars prohibiting the collision that never was.  

The driver of the white car eventually stopped and I pulled up next to him and rolled down my window.  He then rolled down is passenger side window and we looked at each other.  He was a handsome late thirties early forties man that was in shock.  The conversation made up of one liners went like this:

He shouted over to me, "Did I hit you?"

"No, you didn't."

"I didn't hit you?"

"No."

"He pulled out in front of traffic!"

"Yes, I know."

"I can't believe I didn't hit anyone."

"Yes, I know."

"I can't believe he did that."

"Yes, I know."

I couldn't expand my vocabulary because the man just kept talking.  I confirmed for him that everyone and everything was OK and we both drove on.

It is not up for debate whether I saw the fluff protecting our cars.  The point is...is that he and I both could not believe there wasn't an accident.  Divine intervention?  The Universe deciding in a split second it wasn't time for this now?  Guardian angels?  Take your pick.  It did happen.  Fluff rules.