Oil Pan Pyramid

I saw it walking the dog. There is a concrete “pyramid”, one of those things you put by the street in your own yard so people don’t drive over your grass. It’s down the street from me about a block on a corner and it had something dark on it. I’m betting it was oil. 

I hadn’t heard it during the night, but my wife said a car roared down our street in the wee hours of the morning. That car wasn’t able to roar sometime after that I’m betting because it looked like they drove over the concrete pyramid and broke a hole in their oil pan. 

The dog and I got to see the trail the oil made up the street. Driving my car later I saw that the dark trail went down my street, past my house, then turned up the larger street that leads out of the neighborhood. It went all the way up that street and out onto the state highway that passes by my neighborhood as it runs from town, out beyond the suburbs. 

So, my short, routine walk with the dog that usually leaves little to the imagination, left a lot to the imagination. I could see the path somebody else had taken and I could predict it wasn’t going to go well. Were they drunk when it happened? They ran over the concrete pyramid that, along with several others had been there on that corner for years. I know because they were originally at my house.

 The guy who we bought our house from had a thing about people driving in the yard, apparently, and we had a little fortress because of the concrete things. Even we couldn’t park in our yard in front of our house if we wanted to. 

Once I was walking by the corner and the neighbor who lived there said he wished he had more concrete pyramids because people cut the corner too sharply and drove in his yard. I gladly gave him some of mine. It might be that the one that broke this driver’s oil pan had been mine. 

I wondered: how far did he get before the oil drained out of his car and it started doing damage? Maybe he got home, it drained out in his driveway and he noticed it the next day. (I assume it was a guy because, you know...)

Or maybe he drove it just as hard out of the neighborhood as he did down our street and he drove it until the engine seized up. 

If he left wherever he was angry, on the way to where ever he was going, then when his car broke he was more angry. Or more sober. Was he leaving home to dramatically get away to someplace else? Or was he at someone else’s house on his way home? 

What happened to the car that left the trail of oil, I will never know. What were the exact circumstances for the driver I won’t know either. But my usually predictable walk with the dog left a lot to my imagination this time.