Traffic in Fort Worth/Dallas is
absolutely horrendous. One second you will be driving at a solid 65 miles per
hour and the next you are somehow traveling at an average 2 miles an hour for a
solid 30 minutes. Coming from small town America in the Middle of Nowhere,
Texas (San Angelo), I was never really accustomed to traffic. Where I am from,
you have a highway known as Loop 306 (fun fact my father designed and oversaw
the construction of Loop 306) where you pretty much travel to get anywhere in
town. This highway has a speed limit posted at 60 miles an hour which no one
actually follows unless you are like 80 years old and grew up and lived in San
Angelo for almost all of your life. We “youngsters” typically drove an average
70 to 75 miles an hour on this highway with no form of traffic whatsoever that
could low us down. Even the interior portion of the city never really
experienced this foreign entity called “traffic”. It was more of a myth than
anything, something people joked about from time to time. Anyways, we were
driving through Fort Worth/Dallas and lucky for my mother, my grandmother, and
I, we were caught in traffic.
We were up in Arlington for my club
soccer tournament and now headed out after finishing second place. During the
soccer game, we felt cheated the whole time by the referees. It seemed as if
every little thing we did was a foul. Nothing went our way that day. Everyone
was pretty much in a bad mood and on edge. The slightest thing would set us
off, especially the traffic. My mom mentioned that she needed to look for a new
vehicle. She got a new job that required her to travel quite a bit. She was
interested in getting a Toyota Prius since it was remarkably more
fuel-efficient than most other cars. She asked me to google Toyota dealerships
nearby. I found a couple that were a couple miles from us but with this traffic
it transformed a trip estimated to take 5 minutes to get to the destination to
one that would took 30 minutes.
As we were slowly inching our way
along the highway, I drifted off into deep thought. I was recounting the soccer
game and certain plays that occurred. I was thinking of alternate ways I should
have approached certain plays. “Maybe I should have passed the ball earlier.
Maybe I should have shot to the keeper’s left side instead of his right.” What
seemed to be a mere couple of minutes of daydreaming turned out to be almost 30
minutes. Little did I know we passed the exit that we were supposed to get to
the dealership. Normally you can see a dealership along the highway however
this one was located some streets down making the dealership hidden. My mom was
infuriated that I did not tell her when to exit. Being a teen going through
puberty and losing a soccer tournament about 2 hours ago, I retaliated. Thus
commenced the yelling and arguing. I told her we could just go to another
dealership known as “Toyota Heaven” (what an odd name for a dealership). She
complained saying that it would take even longer now, and we might not make it
in time before the dealership closed. I guided her to the dealership while the
arguing was still going. As we were approaching the dealership, we were roaming
around residential streets. It looked nothing like the way towards a dealership
typically appeared. We finally reached the “dealership”. The place was in fact
called “Toyota Heaven”. However little did we know that this place was where
“Toyotas are sent to heaven.” Out of nowhere, we all erupted into laughter.
After all this time we found the exact opposite of what we were looking for,
but for some reason we could not contain the hysterical laughter that was
occurring. Almost immediately did we go from an instance of high tension to intense
laughter. Perhaps the Israelis and Palestinians should adopt this form of
policy. We paid no attention to the traffic and laughed ourselves to the next
dealership, which luckily was still open. At the end of the day, despite the
loss and the frustration, we were somehow able to find laughter in “Toyota Heaven”.
No comments:
Post a Comment