Birthday Excitement

Last Friday was Adrian's birthday (the BIG 30!) As I pulled up to the intersection just before my house my quandary over what kind of cake to get him was quickly snuffed and my heart plunged into my shoes. I tend to be a "glass is mostly empty" type of person and often when I approach that intersection I half expect to see emergency vehicles in front of our burning house with our animals trapped inside. Sounds morbid, but this is seriously the kind of stuff I think about! As I came to the intersection I saw a swarm of flashing emergency lights and traffic being diverted from what looked to be my home. Our street is a busy one, with a speed limit of 35 that people frequently overlook. It's a scary street where pedestrians have been known to be hit by cars driven by people who don't see there's a crosswalk because they're too busy texting and putting on their make-up. When I pulled up there were no flames and trapped animals but a busted up Pontiac in the middle of my front yard. As I tried to recover from what I was sure to be utter catastrophe I came to find out that the driver had supposedly fallen asleep behind the wheel, clipped the power pole 30 feet before my driveway, come up on the curb, bust an axel, plow over our mailbox (and the neighbor's), smash through the remains of a brick pillar at the foot of our driveway and slide neatly between our 4 year old Maple tree and newly planted shrubs to rest in the middle of my lawn spewing oil over my grass and stone walkway. It was completely surreal. My mail was littered out in the wet street, soaked and driven over, and there was concrete (from the brick pillar), glass and metal everywhere. The officer overseeing the removal of the vehicle from my yard saw the stricken look on my face and correctly deduced the I must live here. He pulled the incident report from the remains of a mailbox on our front porch (which the vehicle narrowly missed, thank the Lord) and filled me in on the details. There were four passengers in the vehicle, two of which were a 22 year old mother, her 4 day old baby included. Dad had been taken to the hospital though the officer assured me all were okay (again thank the Lord!) From what I can tell the driver did not have insurance and our homeowners insurance has a deductible higher than the $80 or so it's going to take to replace our mailbox. The steel post it was attached to is bent to hell and not likely to come back. Once the dust settled and we surveyed the damage, we realized the mailbox the police left on our front porch wasn't even ours, it was the neighbor's. Ours was nowhere to be found. I can only hope the rain soaked, but mostly intact mail I pulled out of the street was all there was that day. The neighbor's phonebook wasn't so lucky. The driver was blessed that he only glanced off of the power pole. From the looks of it the entire pole must have shaken as the soil around the base was pushed out several inches. If he had hit it straight on things could have been much worse. I'm incredibly grateful that our tree that I love was spared, that the car came no closer to our house and that all involved lived to tell about it. Adrian's cake was forgotten in the shuffle but he says he didn't miss it. I did. I could have used a big 'ol fatty slice right about then.