Momnesia

Pink Cadillac (well, actually, it was a Ford Escort)

This is one of my favorite stories to tell, because it is so absurd, and yet, 100 percent true.

When I was 24-year-old, I was driving from Milledgeville, Ga., to Athens, Ga. It was 7:45 a.m., and I was hoping desperately that I would not be late, as I had to be at work at 8:30 a.m. in Watkinsville, Ga.

At 7:45 a.m. in middle Georgia, I pretty much had the roads to myself. Every once in a while the stretch of fields, hay bales and forest would give away to a trio or quartet of driveways that wandered back into the treeline. It was rare to be able to see one of the houses from the road, but mailboxes marked these largely dirt tracks as driveways.

I came upon one of these strips and saw from afar that one of the mailboxes had been painted like a cow, and a plastic flamingo had been stuck in the ground next to it. "Oh, great," I thought. "Kitschy crap in the middle of the rural South. Could it be more cliche?" And then, as I drove closer, the flamingo turned it head. It was a real flamingo in the middle of nowhere, Georgia. Shocked, I punched the accelorator accidentally, just as the flamingo spread its wings and began to take flight... right into my car. Had I not sped up, the bird might have escaped the death trap hurtling towards him-or-her at 70 miles an hour. But I did. And pink feathers exploded in the air around me. I screamed as a loud thud vibrated through the car. Swerving too late to avoid the collision, I careened into a shallow ditch while the air settled and the Escort I was driving ground to a halt.

I don't know what the bird was doing in the middle of farmland, the closest zoo two hours away in Atlanta. I don't know why it kamikazied my car. And I don't know what happened to its head. I only know that I was so very happy that a self-service car wash sat on the main drag in Sparta, Georgia. Because I had a lot of bird guts to wash off my car.

And I was definitely late to work.