MARCH 29, SUNDAY

RIGHT TURN ON RED

Today was the first Sunday that we got to hear our new preacher, Jessica Riegal, preach. She is young and lively and maybe she will restore life to the church which our guest preacher last Sunday gave us a pep talk on.

After church I drove to Panera Bakery to meet the women of our church who have Sunday lunch after church at Panera Bakery. But I never made it until they were all done. As I was turning into the Panera parking lot near the mall I went into the left turn lane, stopped at the left turn arrow, waited until it turned green, turned into the parking lot and heard a loud thump as a car whammed into me. I pulled over and stopped and the car behind me pulled over. A young woman with a child in the back seat got out, crying. “I’m so sorry,” she said. I want around to see what had happened. My car had been scraped a little but not really damaged. Hers had a headlight pushed in but was otherwise all right. But she was distraught and immediately got on the phone, to her husband, I thought, and then the police. I said that since it was her fault, because I was turning on a green arrow, that I would be happy to settle for $100 and she wouldn’t have to contact her insurance company and probably have her insurance go up. But she wasn’t listening to me and returned to her phone calls.

Eventually an Asheville policeman showed up. She told her story and I told mine. But this time she was claiming that she had a green light, I was claiming that I had turned on a green light. The policeman said that since he wasn’t there to see it and we had conflicting stories that he wasn’t going to ticket each either one of us or find fault with either one. He wrote up a report stating the personal details and insurance company of each of us but saying noting about us. He was washing his hands of the whole affair. We were on our own with our different insurance companies.

Unfortunately this weighed on me for the rest of the day. After I got home I figured out what must have happened. She was in the opposite lane coming toward me and was going to turn in to go Panera, just as I was. She was stopped at a red light, I appeared to be stopped at a red light, there were no cars moving, so she turned right at the red light, a perfectly legal turn. She was looking right as she turned, never seeing me, and was shocked when she suddenly banged into me.

At the same time as she was readying to turn and my left turn light had turned green and around I went. She swiped my rear side, bouncing off because she was also turning.

It was all a matter of timing. If she had turned more quickly I probably would have seen her and avoided hitting her. If I had turned more quickly and she more slowly I would have been past her and she wouldn’t have hit me. My turn was completely legal, hers was legal if I hadn’t suddenly appeared. I was right because of the green light, she was right because she had looked and seen nothing and turned. That is probably why she felt she had a green light. It was simply an accident that neither one of us could have foreseen or avoided.

But unfortunately, or fourtunately, at the time I hadn’t figured out that the way the lights were staggered that if she was stopped at a red light that at first there would be a green light for those leaving Panera, then a green light for me to turn left into Panera and finally a green light for her to go straight ahead or turn right. She couldn’t possibly have seen a green light, as she told the policeman, until I had seen a green light and turned in. She had to be turning right on red.

But proving she was lying about the green light seems pointless. She wasn’t lying, she remembered that it was legal to turn and she had, in her mind, turned legally. It was simply an accident with no one at fault but my being legally right, almost as the policeman had written it up.

The unfortunate part was that this was the second night of my trying to go to bed early and get up early to prepare for the time change to Amsterdam. I went to sleep on Saturday at 8:30 and got up at 4:30, on Sunday I went to bed at 8:30 and lay awake until midnight replaying the accident in my head, completely screwing up my attempt to change time zones.