Capturing En Passant

The gray car in front of me dawdles. It's a compact sedan, of the Subaru-Suzuki-Toyota-Saturn class. It has mildly snarky enviro-gendero bumperstickers on the back. When I say "dawdles," I mean driving at the appointed city speed limit of 30mph, obeying every caution light, cautiously proceeding without changing lanes. Steady. The driver is a young female, so you can dispose of your notion of a geezer refugee from Florida driving in snowy Syracuse.

As would be the case, I am in a hurry. Or I am in a hurry more than she is. Rather, I am in a hurry more than she appears to be. Even that's wrong. The only "hurry" I'm in is in my head; I have no pressing appointment I am late for, no work-related or social appointment ahead of me. I just want to get home. It's not even that. Ms. Dawdles slows me down, alters my rhythm, puts me at 45rpm when I want 78rpm; she's frustrating me. Can't she see that?! I assume she's not doing it on purpose, because when I pass her (that's how I know she is a young female, in her twenties), she is stoic, impassive, determined, focused on the task at hand, blinders on, oblivious to me, as she should be.

I pass her.

As in a video game, I snake around her and weave through traffic, not hazardously, but quickly enough to erase the frustration of her vehicular dead weight in front of me. I turn right at the light at the crest of a hill and sail toward my apartment building. For no known reason, I sneak in through the western entrance, from the front, not through my typical entrance, near the parking lot.

Have you heard that experts claim weaving in an out of traffic gets you no further along more quickly? I don't know if the so-called expert findings apply only to highway traffic. Nevertheless, I can testify that on more than one occasion I have passed a slo-mo vehicle only to find I have beat him or her to the next red light, where we both wait, as equals, one on the left, another on the right. True, sometimes I have sensed victory be squeezing by, through the caution light, leaving the passed car in the dust, captured there by time and space until the light turns green -- and initiating the remote possibility we shall meet again, as equals, at the very next red light.

Chess has a move called capturing en passant. It means capturing in passing in French and refers to a change in the rules, so to speak, that enables a pawn to be captured when it advances two squares just as if it had advanced one square. Sort of like the aforementioned meet-at-the-red-light scenario.

When I turned right to go to the parking lot for my apartment, approaching from the south not the usual north, guess who slowly glided past me? You got it. Ms. Dawdles! She beat me! How? And don't recirte that turtle and hare fable.

She got out and walked toward the building entrance. She must have been a visitor because I did not recognize her car.

I chuckled to myself, not being someone who typically erupts into LOL. (Who really is?)

I don't know what this portends or what lesson to learn.

I'm refraining from easy metaphors.

I'm not so "quick" to go there now, anyway.  

haiku 1 winter 2018

crackling-nostril cold

breath exhalations rising

vertical ice plumes

kit-kat club

Driving upon the snowy, slushy streets of Liverpool, the one in New York, not the one of Beatles fame, I paused because the traffic in front of me had paused, as the parade of vehicles waited for a light (officially called a "signal" by transportation officials) to change (having mentioned The Beatles, I owed you "A Day in the Life" reference). (Notice that the preceding sentence, discursive and parenthetically laden as it is, constitutes one legit grammatically and anatomically correct sentence in the English language. One of the most annoying observations by lay people is that a long-winded or Proustian sentence is "a run-on sentence." Wrong. A run-on sentence has nothing whatsoever to do with sentence length; size does not matter. Go ahead; Google it if you must.) I noticed that the light had indeed changed (with nobody blowing their mind out in a car, by all appearances). The traffic started moving again, imprinting the white-gray mush with snow- or all-season tires' signature treads. A bluish-gray Mazda hatchback inched along immediately in front of my 2007 VW Rabbit (141,000 miles). Without warning, my eyes caught a flash of fuzzy-furry white jumping onto a shelf (not exactly a shelf but I don't know what else to call it) in the back of the Mazda. It was not a projectile of knitting wool as one might purchase a skein of in Reykjavik (not white), as I had bought for soon-to-ex-wife in 2016. It was not some plush toy tossed by a frustrated, hungry, or unruly child sitting in a carseat in back. No. It was a cat! A living, alive, moving cat. A cat whose catface expression conveyed annoyance, adventure, impertinence, play, irritation, and frustration. A cat whose movement was swift and certain. It jumped up, scouted the shelf and the scene outside, and darted away out of my sight. gone. I saw it. It was not a vision. The frisky feline gave no evidence of seeing the driver who was arrested by his or her sudden movement. What evidence could there possibly be? Beats me. It couldn't wave. Hold it. As a matter of fact, it catpawed at the air, as if trying to capture an invisible mouse or sparrow. It couldn't help doing that. Its catnature demanded such alert alacrity. Could the feline  -- I wanted to say felicitous feline, just to be alliterative, but I can't be certain said cat was felicitous or infelicitous -- have signaled a quick wave to me, a hello, an acknowledgment of a fellow-living-creature's presence, a greeting, or a fuckyou message? I'll never know. I can't interview the cat because the car moved along, the cat stayed in the car as I did in mine, and we went our merry human and feline ways. The thing is, have you ever seen a live cat in a car before? Not a cat in a cat carrier. A live-prancing-around-as-if-in-the-wild-or-in-a-living-room cat? (That's a lot of hyphens, buster.) I don't recall ever seeing a cat catting around in a car before. Is it legal? Is it safe? Do dogs mind? (Mice and birds don't mind, as long as the cat stays in the car.) Is there a risk of escape and therefore cats in cars is only a wintry, closed-window phenomenon? Finally, there's the most solemn and deep question of all: why?