In the middle of the afternoon, I was sitting at my computer, when, suddenly--crash, bang, crack-em-up! The computer monitor flickered and died. I looked outside and saw a candy apple red Chrysler PT Cruiser sitting in the front yard.

The utility pole was cracked. I telephoned to the electric company, to report the outage. Soon, there was a crowd of people in the front yard, some of them erstwhile passengers in the PT Cruiser, some merely onlookers. The other car involved in the accident, a black Pontiac Grand Am, was across the street, in the parking lot of the convenience store. Presently, there were three police cars, an ambulance, a fire truck, and two wreckers on the scene. I went across to the convenience store, ostensibly to get a soda pop, but, in reality, to talk to the clerk and to look at the other car to see what kind of condition it was in. The front of it was messed up pretty badly.

The emergency medical technicians put the driver of the Pontiac on a stretcher and took him away in the ambulance. I don't know how badly he was injured. Someone from the electric company came in a truck that had one of those devices consisting of a bucket on the end of an arm, designed to lift a person up to the power lines. He surveyed the situation, told me that some of the wires were shorted out, and that a crew would have to come to restore the power. Then he left.

One of the wreckers backed up to the curb, in front of the house, and removed the car from the front yard. I had been concerned that the car might have damaged the house, but it didn't touch it. Now, the lights are back on, and the only evidence of a wreck, other than the cracked utility pole, are a few shallow ruts in the front lawn, which I will fill with dirt in a day or two.