The Petrellas had a garage sale last June. One of our departing (satisfied) customers left a large scratch across the left corner of my rear bumper. It’s a little embarrassing but not entirely noticeable, so I never cared too much about it.

Fast forward to this morning.

I was leaving around 7:15 and the dew was still all over my car. I was backing out of my parking space and saw a guy walking through the front gate.(I blame the coming account of paranoia on recent episodes of Lost that show those suspicious Others in casual garments.) It seemed odd for a man to be walking through the gate at that time of morning. I didn’t recognize him as a neighbor, he wasn’t dressed that warmly, and I had brief moments to wonder what would possess a man to take a casual walk in jeans that early in the morning. Just one of those sights where something doesn’t add up. In this case, I think the lack of spandex. There’s no way that guy was taking a morning jog. This is the kind of observation that seems to take a good twenty seconds but it was more like five seconds and I was in the middle of thinking about it when-
CR-UNK. (Excuse my attempts at onomatopoeia. I read a lot of children’s books aloud these days. Believe me- if you were seven, you’d love it.)
I had hit the curb. Hopefully it was the curb. I still couldn’t see out of the back windshield and the guy was staring at me. Maybe he even knew that he looked like an Other. Anyway, I felt myself get completely flushed and sped (sort of) away.
As soon as I was out of sight of the pedestrian, I got out of my car to check the trunk. I didn’t see any kind of mark or scratch.
However. If my mental outline of the parking lot was off, it meant there was a chance I had backed into one of the handicapped spaces just to the right of the curb. Since I had driven off so quickly, I hadn’t checked to see if I had only bumped the curb… or a handicapped vehicle.
My weighty conscience instantly went to work and I felt a rushing wave of nausea. I got back in the car, drove back past the same guy- so, so embarrassing- and back to where I had just been. More good news- there was no way I had hit a handicapped car, because a huge OAK tree was growing behind my former parking space. (So my mental image was way off- I had no recollection of an oak tree.) I felt much better knowing I could go off and sculpt young minds without having to leave a note on a handicapped vehicle explaining that I had hit their car due to ridiculous suspicians and an obsession with a sci-fi show.
When I got to school, I unpacked my (huge amounts of) teacher stuff and went to close my back door.
Large scratch across the RIGHT rear corner of my bumper. Oak colored.

So now the rear bumper corners match.