Hoping for the Best

I ran this morning with my friend Al.  Al told me about something that happened to him the other night; something that I thought only happened in nightmares.  You know, like the one where you’re in school and you’re not wearing any clothes or the one where you’re running for your life and for some inexplicable reason you’re running in slow motion. 

Anyway, Al had to attend a business dinner on the north side of Atlanta that took him on a toll road.  When he came to the tollbooth Al didn’t have the necessary change for the 50-cent toll so he drove through a tollbooth with an attendant inside so he could get change for a one-dollar bill.  Perfect; he had paid the toll and had two quarters left to throw in the basket at one of the unattended toll booths on the way home.  Therein lies the problem: Al had to throw both quarters in the basket on the way home.  He tossed the first quarter in the basket without any problem.  No such luck with the second one.  (Let me point out the toll baskets have about a three-foot radius and are located no more than one foot from your driver’s side window.)  It missed the basket entirely and quickly rolled off into destinations unknown, leaving Al with a tollbooth gate blocking his exit, no change to pay the balance of the toll, no attendant to give him any change and a line of cars impatiently backed up in his lane anxious to get home after a hectic day at the office.  The perfect storm, right?

So what does Al do?  He gets out of his car in hopes of finding his errant quarter but instead sees a plethora of pennies lying on the ground below the toll basket.  He starts picking them up—one at a time and tosses them into the basket.  ‘One…two…three…four…’ until an attendant recognizes the imminent danger Al is in—‘toll rage,’ no doubt—and walks over and drops a quarter into Al’s toll basket, allowing Al to drive away, void of any bodily harm.

I mention this because Al graduated from the University of Georgia.  Today my Florida Gators play the Georgia Bulldogs and I wanted to get one last shot in before today’s 3:30 p.m. kickoff.  It might be my last opportunity for a while, as I fear what maim and destruction might come to my orange-and-blue once the game gets underway.