Three close calls. That’s the limit, the way I’ve heard it. These are the kinds of things that “come in threes,” right? Of course they do.
Except not. Assumptions like that can lead to eventful days–like yesterday. Being a warm October day, I thought I’d bike into Durham on the American Tobacco Trail and try out the early voting opportunities there. A mile from home, I hit something in the leaf litter that threw me onto my front tire. I was balanced there, like one of those stunt motorcyclists. I held it together on one wheel for a second and righted myself. On I went.
Crossing a normally peaceful side street, I was confronted by a hurtling, two-ton vehicle bearing down on me. Brake hard; take evasive action. Check.
Later, taking off from a stop at a light, going straight, a driver beside me decided to make a right regardless of my existence in the space toward which he headed his car. The booming bass and rattling widows gave me an aural picture of what I had to miss. Sporting of him. Not even that close.
And we’re riding! We’re riding! Continue reading

As we would learn, traffic patterns near the
Stringent though they might be, breaking laws such as these does not really attract much notice in a city where the cops are beleaguered, with real crime to deal with. I mean, if something bad had happened on the FDR, the final disposition of the legal case and the inevitable law suits would have gone against me. As it was, frankly exhausted from the day of packing, unpacking, loading, unloading…and loading again, and then driving for several hours with brakes that technically didn’t work until just before I was about to crash into the vehicle ahead of me, this little legality seemed like something of which I could plausibly deny knowledge.
The other thing about late June is that it’s hot, and it rains a lot. Ah, the rain. Loading our rental truck, unloading said truck, stopping briefly to check whether things had shifted in transit–all of these were occasions for a downpour. It was uncanny, but again, the uncanniness came from the fact that we didn’t yet fully comprehend the star-crossed nature of this particular expedition. Had I known what I know now, I would have opened an umbrella each time I reached for the latch on the truck’s back door.
We at least had a free option for storage–my mother-in-law’s garage in
This was a significant life event for me. I had lived in and around