Encounters with the Authorities

Colliding with Scheherazade

Recently, while I was traveling west through a green light at the intersection of Cork and Burdick Streets, coming from visiting my sister-in-law Heather, a car turned left, north onto Burdick, in front of me. Though I braked and swung right to avoid the crash, the front of my newly acquired 1982 VW diesel truck met the right rear body panel of the late-model green sedan. The impact knocked my reinforced bumper to the right so it stuck out a foot on the passenger side, and I would discover later that it bent the frame. As soon as we limped our cars into the corner gas station parking lot and got out, both of us remembered to say how our not being hurt was the most important thing. Our bodies were fine, we assured each other. Unlike my sister-in-law's body, I thought—she's been bleeding for two weeks and she's scared. The other driver, a college sophomore, suggested we need not call the police. But I had no collision coverage on the little truck, and I would never collect on the insurance if the sophomore didn't get a ticket. To be honest, I only knew this fact about insurance coverage because a woman who witnessed the accident while pumping gas into her SUV came over and told me so. The sophomore had her own witness, a woman who had been right behind her in another SUV; this woman comforted the sophomore and assured her the accident could not possibly have been her fault—after all, she had stopped before turning left and, presumably, looked.

The left front corner of my truck had pressed a deep dent in her car. Her parents were going to be so mad, she said. The bashed-in front fender on the driver's side was from an accident a month ago, she told me. If I called the cops, her insurance was going to go up a lot. After one of several rapid-fire cell phone calls, the sophomore said it might go up as much as two hundred dollars a month. The sophomore was alone in the car at the time of the accident, but her first friend arrived on the scene within minutes. Within a quarter hour, a half dozen girlfriends would show up to commiserate. She did not offer to let me use her phone, so I went into the gas station to call the police.

My witness, whose name was Betty, offered her phone number, in case the sophomore contested the facts. I managed to produce a clipboard and paper, but my hand was shaking so violently from the adrenalin surge that I couldn't write her name or number. Because I couldn't write, Betty generously copied down all the information from the other driver. It's shocking how a trauma can compromise your simple rational functions and force you to rely on other people. Maybe with a big trauma, your functions stay screwed up for awhile, maybe months, maybe the rest of your life in some cases. This adrenaline surge problem is maybe why my brother Tom and his wife, Heather, have been unable to calm down, get the facts straight about what has happened to them, and to get a lawyer to help them unravel their legal situation. They need help.

Betty asked the sophomore for her driver's license and proof of insurance. Betty didn't even raise an eyebrow as she wrote the young woman's first name on my clipboard: Scheherazade. Sheh-hare-eh-zahd. Stress on the second and fourth syllables.

Scheherazade. What a pleasure to read that name, to set it loose in my head. What wonderful parents she must have, to have chosen that name for her. Though her assembled friends were grumbling about my calling the police, Scheherazade was keeping her cool, preparing for the inevitable. The world must slow down a little for a young woman with such a name. Everyone must pause and attempt to pronounce it. The name conjures up a strange and ancient world...