Squashed!

At dawn on the last day of the year, my husband and I were walking along a rural highway in South Carolina, following a trail of broken things. I had left my pocketbook on top of the car at a gas station late the previous night, something we didn't realize till we got to my mother-in-law's house about 45 minutes later.

It was too dark to search then, but all night I fretted. Had it fallen off right in the gas station lot, and was someone even now using my Visa card to order a vintage Corvette? Was some fan using the cell phone to leave long messages on Ricky Martin's answering machine? How would I ever replace all those little plastic cards, when I couldn't even remember what half of them were for? I pictured myself spending all afternoon at the DMV, glumly waiting to pose for a new license.

Why was the sight of an exploded pocketbook so gratifying? It seemed a sudden opportunity to be free from all these nattering things that pin us down.

There was something even worse. I didn't tell Gary this. My list of Internet passwords was in that pocketbook. The card I'd been scribbling them on for years had gotten so bent and dingy that I thought I'd make a fresh one during the long car trip. So much for that idea. Not only could I not remember all those passwords, to speedily change them, I couldn't even remember all the sites on the list.

All night, these tiny windows of vulnerability kept opening in my dreams. I felt like I was being shot at with miniature arrows. We set the alarm for an hour before sunrise and soon were back in the car, gliding along and scanning the other side of the highway.

"There are a lot more black clumps on the road than you'd think," Gary said, as we passed another unidentifiable object. There were also plenty of flattened dogs. I'd never looked so intently at asphalt before. Behind us, the skyline shifted from oyster gray to misty pink, while up ahead the high tips of trees burned with sudden gold.

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