Friday, February 29, 2008

The lady, her Audi and my glasses

On January 31 as my wife and I were running, we saw this older lady stuck with her Audi A4 convertible on a huge snow bank left earlier by the snowplow into her driveway. She had been mistaken into thinking that her German car was just like a Sherman Tank or simply a Hummer. Her vehicle was unable to move, the two front wheels hanging in the air. We immediately stopped and offered to help. I sat behind the wheel and, assuming that it was an all-drive car - an Audi, right? - I tried to rock the car back and forth, but this didn’t help since that particular model was only front-wheel drive. I then proceeded with a shovel to dig out the car underbelly and in the process stuck my eyeglasses in the breast pocket of my jacket. They fell once; I picked them up and stuffed them back into the pocket, each time failing to pull the zipper closed. I obviously lost them a second time in all that fresh powder snow, tried in vain to look for them and went back to digging out the automobile. After twenty minutes of shoveling the car was finally free to move and the lady barely thanked us and that was it. I immediately ordered a replacement pair of glasses, picked them up this Monday, they looked good on me and the case was closed. I must say however that in the meantime and as I was running daily around the spot where the incident occurred, a little voice inside me kept on ordering my wandering eyes to look for the lost item while my rational, manly side was telling me that I was a big fool in hoping to ever find it. Well, lo and behold, that’s precisely what happened on Wednesday as I was running and caught a glimpse of a dirty, but intact pair of glasses neatly folded and laying in the gutter some twenty feet away from where it all happened. My good Samaritan gesture was no longer penalized and my gut-feeling vindicated!

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