Karma's A Termagant

Nuria got up early, as she does every morning, and unbeknownst to me, she drove her new used car. First she went for her morning walk. She walked to the city's municipal building and registered her car so that they can send her a tax bill. She even registered the car that was wrecked and they will send her a tax bill for that car, too.

But then she drove to Walmart and bought groceries. And on the way back ... I hate to say this, because, she just had a wreck with her previous vehicle, and what are the odds of having another incident so soon, but stuff happens. And when she got back to my house—as luck would have it—just after she had parked her car and the trip was seemingly finished, she...

Hold on, someone's at the door.

Ok, I'm back. They were selling Girl Scout cookies. Now where was I?

Oh yes, Nuria went to the store and just when she got home and parked her Toyota,  she ... she ... she dropped her house key into that crack between the seat and the center floor hump. And she couldn't find it. So she called me on her phone, and I went out to her car and retrieved the key.

What? You thought she had wrecked her new car? Banish the thought!

While I was outside, I was hailed by a man standing on a neighbor's porch. I didn't recognize him, but he knew me. It turned out that he was the son of the woman who lives there. He's been gone for several years, and he was about 18 years old when he disappeared. He was in trouble with the law a few times, and then he disappeared. I assumed he had gone to prison, probably on a drug charge. Now he's back home for a while.

I have a cousin with the same name as the young man on my neighbor's porch. He (my cousin) went to prison, too, for stabbing someone with a knife. My cousin has a brother (who is also my cousin), and the brother went to prison for seven years for vehicular manslaughter. He was driving at 109 miles per hour on the DC Beltway at 2AM when he ran into the rear of another car. Five people were riding in the car he hit, and a woman was killed. The car he hit was knocked across the median strip where an oncoming passenger van collided with it, injuring the passengers in that van. A female passenger in my cousin's car suffered a broken back and ended up in the hospital. My cousin walked away unhurt. In fact, he kept on walking, and by the time police arrived at the accident, he was nowhere to be seen. The police used helicopters to look for him and they found him walking down a residential street at 4AM. Hence, the seven year prison term. 

Karma can be a bitch if you don't treat your life and the lives of others with love and respect. I look at people like my neighbor's son and my two cousins as "young souls." They'll learn, the hard way. As Rev. Marion Starnes of Terra Nova Center once said to me, concerning first generation souls, "...first generations are too busy trying to get themselves out of jail."

Amen to that.