Last night, I was heading home on my bike and had an interesting encounter.  Past the hill near Cardozo High on 13 ^th, this little old lady is trying to cross the road at a crosswalk.  Not surprisingly, nobody is stopping for her, despite the obvious fact that she 's frail – and, frankly, looks like a very nice grandmotherly type .  For most pedestrians, it's usually pretty easy to be assertive here, as traffic is generally crawling at rush hour – with one fat person per SUV, this isn't a surprise !  As it happens, however, traffic was NOT crawling so much last night, at least not at that location, which caused a bit more of a challenge for this particular pedestrian.  As I rolled up and saw this happening, it occurred to me that this situation needed an intervention.  So, I took my place in the middle of the lane and stopped at the crosswalk, forcing the car behind me to stop, and flagged the nice grandmother type across.

When the horns predictably blared, I pointed out my reason for stopping, and was mildly surprised that this didn 't cause the horns to stop blaring.  When I then realized that the cars in the other lane appeared to have no inten tion of stopping either, I got off my bike and walked with the nice lady across the street, betwee n her and the traffic.  At this point, I' m no longer mildly surprised but greatly irritated at the lack of civility displayed by the 4-wheelers.   The grandmother type seemed genuinely grateful, called me a "nice young man " (the "young" part stuck out as the real compliment!), and off I went.

Here' s the truly happy ending:  Two blocks up, that first car that was blaring at me was pulled over by a police officer , who was writing a ticket.  No idea what the violation was, but it helped restore by my hope-against-hope that there 's something to the mystical ways of karm ic intervention.  Sometimes, what goes around really does come around!

-- posted by Chris