Elul Reflections

File this one under: For a weekly columnist, especially one on tight pre-chag deadlines, there are no really bad experiences, as long as no one is hurt — just grist for the mill.

Just before Tishah B’Av, I was driving to Hadassah Ein Kerem to pick up my mother, who had just spent three weeks in the hospital. Only one problem: The gas needle was precariously near empty. And that entailed a stop at a gas station at the end of the Kiryat Yovel neighborhood that I had seen plenty of times over the previous three weeks but never visited.

There was a woman at the first set of gas pumps who seemed to be preparing to leave. Unfortunately, before doing so, she decided to pull out her phone and call someone. And with one hand on her phone, and the phone to her ear, she lacked the dexterity to put on her seat belt. Putting down the phone for a moment did not seem to occur to her.

I was under time pressure from the thought of keeping my mother waiting, and decided to pull around the car at the second bank of gas pumps and see whether I could nudge the woman in front to put a move on it. Unfortunately, as I did so, I managed to barely clip the car in back. Depth perception, it appears, is not what it used to be at seventy.