#1171 Coffee Requiem

The big tragedies are bad enough in life. The poverty and hunger and mass murders. So we all take refuge in the relative placidity invoked by day-to-day things going mostly right. Which makes the mini-tragedies disproportionately upsetting.
What happened was simple enough. The tragedy was I was unable to communicate with the person it was happening to. And that was because we were each in our separate cars. And we have no such thing as car-to-car communication between strangers.
So to the person who lost his or her coffee cup the other morning, and who is even now wracked with doubt and worry, here’s what happened.
I saw you driving well in front of me down State Street headed downtown. Your car was a Honda Civic. On top of it was your coffee cup. It was one of those travel cups, it looked like stainless steel, but it was hard to tell as it was a little foggy and you were a block ahead.
Too far for me to speed up and try to tell you with my limited command of mime that your coffee cup was on the roof of your car.
What was amazing was that it stayed there for so long. After a few blocks, and speeding up and braking and such, I was half convinced it was a joke coffee cup. That it had a magnetic bottom and was meant to look like you had forgotten it as you got into your car and drove blithely off.
Still, I wished I could warn you in some way. But such is the other tragedy of our private enclosed vehicle cocoons. Had we been in horse drawn wagons I could have shouted. But I didn’t know your cell and my Morse Code is little rusty.
Using my car horn to tap out that Morse Code would certainly draw unwanted attention from other quarters in any event.
So I watched helplessly. Knowing what was going to happen but unable to prevent it. You finally turned a corner somewhere around Eastside or Quince. Your coffee cup flew off and smashed on the ground.
And so I composed this requiem for a wrecked coffee cup.
I hope you’re reading this…
Now you know.
America, ya gotta love it.