Always check behind you.

It's too cliche to be believed and yet I assure you, of all the fiction in the posts of this blog, this story is the gospel truth (not that I consider the actual Gospel a paradigm of verity). I was driving up Cook St. in the semi-suburbs of Victoria late one afternoon with Amelia in the passenger seat. As usual, I was blathering about some self-gratifying topic of interest and paying little attention to the sides of the road. Normally, she is politely attentive to my intellectual verbal tangents. In this instance, however, she abruptly interrupted me as she leaned forward, spit her mouthful of coffee all across the dashboard and onto the inside of the windshield and burst into laughter screeching, "NO WAY!" Of course, I snapped my eyes in the direction she was pointing to discover her shock. It was a simple sight that you would be sure to see only in a situation comedy, and yet I was staring it right in the face. Well, not exactly the 'face'. Walking up the hill on the far sidewalk was a conservatively dressed woman, circa 30 years of age, wearing the blouse of a true bargain-huntress and an ankle-length brown skirt. A shorter skirt would have been less comical but this was an ankle-length brown skirt, indicative of an obviously conservative individual. Now, let me be clear that it was not the woman's fashion choices that had caused Amelia such an abruption, but the fact that her skirt was tucked into her pantyhose in the back revealing her backside undergarments fully and completely. You go your whole life expecting that you will never see something so cliche, but there it was. Now my choice was such: do I pull over and inform her so that she can put an end to her humiliation, but become the evil messenger revelling in her misfortune, or do I just keep going and let her discover it on her own, which was clearly not imminent. I bit the bullet and pulled over. When I told her that she really needed to look behind herself, I was sure to be as polite and sympathetic as I could be, poor woman. The unfortunate young woman was left only with stifled silence from the front seat of our car as we drove away.
See you in hell,
Shakes.