Once I absorbed the blow (every new car has to get hit sometime), and ascertained that Briggs was physically unharmed (a little bruised by the air bags, it turns out). I had to know what had happened. She was waiting to make a left hand-turn in an intersection and was hit by an oncoming car. Everyone at the scene was solicitous. The voice I'd heard on our answering machine was the paramedic who arrived, asking B if she wanted to leave me a message. It's probably just as well that she didn't.

Now Briggs feels like she's being confronted with her greatest fears one right after another. She spent the rest of the day reliving the moment before the impact ("yellow van, boom! yellow van, boom!), and has no memory of the incident itself (I think shock messes up short-term memory storage). I'm not going down to my office now, so we cocoon at home instead, nursing our respective wounds. I could be angry, but I'm not. This seems like a karmic response to my smashing up Hopper's car back when it was just about this new in '86, and my smashing the front end of B's old used car a few years back when a van braked suddenly in front of me. I'm a little worried about the car not being able to recover fully, but I'm much more concerned that B does fall into a funk because of this.

I had to go to my office today to try to get this chapter done. First I had to review a bunch of chapters that had never been sent to me until they were already late. I'm supposed to finish submitting this book by next Friday, but things keep slowing me down. Soon, I've got to head home. We're going to take a walk over the hill down to Lakeshore and get some more coffee at Peet's. Then maybe we'll walk to Spettro's near by and have dinner. We've never eaten there and it's very popular but we'll be early.

We can't get either car (the old one still has that problem with its brakes), looked at till tomorrow anyway.