Two days ago my normal drive home from work was extraordinarily atypical. The first hour was just like the first hour, but the last half hour took an hour and forty-five minutes. Traffic is an annoyance from time to time, but the day before yesterday was not only the worst but also one of the few (maybe four) times I've had to deal with bad traffic since our recent move last May. While it would be easy to just be mad about the stop and go traffic or be frustrated because I never saw a wreck, police car, or other reason for why traffic on both I-10 or the parallel and within sight Highway 90 across Mobile Bay was so congested I took it all in stride. This morning however, was a different matter. The drive this morning was uneventful. The moon was incredibly brilliant even after the sun rose. The traffic flowed nicely without too many of the morons in the stream. A tangent here would be to remind you that people driving slower than you are idiots and faster than you are morons and a common Southern driver trait is to make idiots of as many morons as possible. So it wasn't this morning's traffic that caused a difference. It was ruminating on yesterday's drive that made things interesting.
On the way home I spoke with a good friend about some issues he is going through, one of which is a severe test to his marriage. While he was far from the traffic mess I was in, it was his situation as well as two other friends in similar marital straits that got me thinking about the traffic.
From time to time in my life I've had a broken down vehicle. Whether stopped on the side of the road, in the middle of an intersection, malfunctioning lights, gauges, low on gas, any number of things that caused me to be a hinderance to traffic. As a result I try to be more understanding of someone who may be in a similar situation. Along that vein, this morning I began to think that there may well have been an individual stuck in the traffic that took three times as long to get where they were going and where they were going could have been a rendezvous for an extramarital affair.
I would happily sit for an extra 45 minutes in traffic to save one more marriage, would you?
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