Things I'm Glad Happen to Me and Not John Nevergall.

I drove my car today. The paper said 60% chance of rain, and the sky concurred, and I thought I'd just better suck it up and drive. Church, the restaurant, and my house marked on a map make an almost equilateral triangle, seven miles each leg, and that's a long way to be from your next destination when it's pouring rain.

Now it's happened before that my car, sitting unused under the Florida sun for days at a time, becomes a cozy, shady spot for some creature or other to camp out. A favorite camp site seems to be right under the windshield wipers. You can imagine, since it usually has to be raining for me to get in the car, and since rain means going for the windshield wipers, I tend to get a rather abrupt introduction to my car's little tennants.

Lots of spiders. Occasionally a lizard. (You know the anoles they sell at Valpo Pet N Hobby for $9.00? Come visit me in Florida and I'll catch you one for free. I'll catch you eight. They're everywhere.)

I was two miles down 66th Street and hadn't turned on the wipers yet when I saw the little reptilian head, staring reproachfully at me from its new flat: right you-know-exactly-where on the car. Then he disappeared, and half a mile later, when the rain picked up, I thought the lizard (I THOUGHT it was a lizard, stop getting ahead of me) might have scampered away, the way you DO when your house rumbles to life and runs away on you.

I went for the wipers.

And my wipers dragged a foot-long snake across my windshield. An upset, writhing, foot-long snake.

Allow me to describe that moment for you.

In a moment like that, you don't think about the glass separating you. You spit, sputter, and swear, and bat frantically at the wiper control, and turn it on MAX before you manage to turn it off, and the snake's gone who-knows-where, before you know it, and that's it. It's over. The CD changes tracks and you're still safely in the center lane and, hmmm, your heart's on the dashboard, that's different, but really perhaps none of this ever happened at all.

The tires kick mist into the exhaust and you shoot on down the street through shades of grey.