morning commute

Repressed desire to drive someone under?  Put some sucker in your dust because you didn't get invited to that birthday party back in seventh grade?  

Got to be some explanation why cars trailing behind me on the highway up over the hill out of Stanwood immediately pull out around as soon as we clear the ramp onto I-5.

Then one day recently, halfway through psychoanalyzing a dude in a jacked up pickup with aggressively bright headlights, I stabilized my speed around sixty-two and glanced over at a roadside sign that must have been processed in a different part of my brain all these years.

Speed limit 70.

oh

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This story centered around using that quiet little ....oh.... at the end. I had the beginning and middle of the story pretty well lined out for a long time but never could quite work out how to write an ending.  

The quiet little ....oh.... comes from a four-year-old boy at the Y with his grampy.  On two different occasions the little guy was chattering away non stop when the old man said something to him, redirection not rebuke, and the kid stopped suddenly said ....oh.... (as in "I never thought of it that way grampy, I'll stop messing around and get dressed so we can go home for lunch"), followed by total silence while he toweled himself dry and got dressed.


Cutest little oh you ever heard.  Kind of stuck in my head like an earworm.  The day I looked over at the speed limit sign the voice in my head said ....oh.... and I knew I had the story finished.  Processing conflicting information in different parts of the mind, and that little boy's ....oh....