So once—January 5, actually—there was this man standing outside Bank of America; long hair tied in a ponytail, beard, drinking a Big Gulp, pacing, trying to figure out how he was going to patch the hole.
It was probably 4 feet by 6 feet, through the wall of the bank. The noon sun was sailing onward, and the drywaller would have to patch it by nightfall, because a hole that size in the side of a bank would, by any laws of storytelling, require someone to slip inside and make off with bags of money by morning.
His name was Jack Thompson, and he paced anxiously, talked briefly on the cell phone to his boss, then leaned against his work truck, took a sip of soda ... watching, waiting ...
Because first someone would have to remove the four-door beige sedan from that hole.
accident: n. 1. a. An unexpected, undesirable event. b. An unforeseen incident. 2. Chance, fortuity: discovered the secret by accident. 3. Logic. An attribute that is not essential to the nature of something.
Once—January 5, actually— Mrs. Mary Lou Somr, 89, did some banking. She was white-haired and wearing a beautifully embroidered denim shirt over her diminutive frame, and had eyeglasses so large they covered a good third of her face, magnifying her eyes so that she appeared constantly startled. She finished her banking and drove her car onto Horizon Ridge at Eastern, and, as she recalled later, "the gas just went fast and I hit the curb and it threw my car across the median," popping it through some hedges and placing it halfway inside BofA. She was unharmed, and harmed no one. Appropo of nothing logical, the beige of her car perfectly matched the beige of the bank's exterior wall, making it possible, later, while staring at the scene with the drywaller, to imagine that accidents aren't accidents at all, but purposeful in a universe moth-holed with them. One is likely to let logic loose at moments like this.
Police and fire personnel arrived quickly and removed Mrs. Somr, of Henderson and formerly of LA, through her back window, and within what must have felt for her like those surreal, slow-motion but fast-happening moments of what-the-hell-just-happened, they had her checked out and sitting in the back of her relatives' Altima. Also beige. The family called their insurance company, and waited.
By the time the TV news crews arrived and got plenty of shots of the car stuck in the wall, other holes to fill were accumulating—like, "What's the story here beyond 'Woman Plows Through Bank Wall'?"
One TV news organization moved the story this way:
"How old is too old to drive?" which made another hole for some public official to fill, and why not the Henderson Police Department spokesman, whose job it is, like Mr. Thompson's, to fill holes quickly before more damage is done: "People of all ages have accidents," spokesman Keith Paul said. True enough. One hole patched, if not permanently, at least for the night.
A tow truck arrived, and the driver attached chains to Mrs. Somr's car and slowly extracted it from the stucco and Styrofoam mouth of the bank's south wall. Onlookers snapped pictures with their cell cams because, let's face it, that's an opportunity that may not arise again shortly, and imagine the many awkward holes in future conversations that would be filled by these people telling the tale of January 5—the day Mrs. Somr drove her car through the Bank of America—and here's the photo to prove it.
Frankly, as no one was hurt, I think we were all quite satisfied to have accidentally come across this accident scene on an average Thursday. Each of us off-kilter in some way, leaning a bit too far toward mediocrity perhaps and in need of whatever this accident could do to counterbalance our coffee spoon days, we all reacted rather perkily. "I've seen a lot ... but nothing like this," laughed a TV cameraman. Later, at the nearby Port-o-Subs, customers would amuse each other with quips about "drive-through banking."
And so we would all fill holes here; I in this publication, Mr. Paul in public opinion, TV journalists in their 5 o'clock lineup, onlookers in dozens of future conversations, and shortly before 3 p.m., Mr. Thompson, in the bank wall, with wood and wire and stucco and a trowel.
Note that Mrs. Somr got out of her relatives' car to watch the scrunched sedan being removed from the hole she made. She is fragile, now two months from 90, and stood precariously atop a stretch of small but rugged landscaping stones next to the flattened shrubs. She began to wobble—and I reached out to her—but she quickly regained her balance on her own—fortuity and response—and what is life if not that?