Fear and Trembling in a Supermarket Parking Lot

Editor’s Note: Russell Frank’s column will not be appearing next week. He will return the following Friday.

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It was the most routine of routine maneuvers. I pulled into a head-in spot in the grocery store parking lot – and rolled a few inches too far. Crunch. The underside of the front bumper had scraped the curb, like a boat run aground on a sandbar.

I put ‘er in reverse. Worse crunch. I stopped, got out and saw that if I kept going, the curb would pop the bumper off like a church key uncapping a soda bottle.

Fortunately, I had a passenger. I asked my daughter to push the underside of the bumper up against the chassis while I backed up. I got back in the car, and slowed myself down to make extra-extra sure not to put the car in a forward gear lest I put Rosa in harm’s way.

Success. I did not turn mishap into mayhem by running over my daughter, and car was free of curb.

Then I got out again to inspect the damage. The right side of the bumper had pulled away from the fender. Cosmetically speaking, this was a minor injury, more dislocated shoulder than snapped limb. But it is precisely because our cars are extensions of our bodies that any disfigurement of their smooth, taut skins sickens us.

I was inordinately (though quietly) upset. Part of it had to do with the awareness that even minor bodywork can carry a major price tag. But mostly I felt a kind of horror at the very nature of time and matter, at the way the tiniest moment of inattention can be so disproportionately consequential, so utterly irreversible.

We can run film backwards and watch a shattered glass reassemble itself and then leap back onto the table, but that is exactly what we cannot do in real life. We can never unbreak the glass. I don’t get a do-over on my botched parking job. Time unspools in one direction only. Damage can be repaired; it cannot unhappen. The child in me finds this unfair.

Even in the most heinous criminal cases, say, the murder of a Kansas farm family that Truman Capote explored in ‘In Cold Blood,’ part of me can sympathize with killer Perry Smith’s bewilderment at his own actions. He didn’t mean to do it. It feels like something that just happened, that things just kind of spiraled out of control, though he’s the one who spiraled out of control.

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The day after my parking lot mishap, I took my son in for a doctor’s appointment. In the waiting room with us were people with ailments visible and invisible. A guy in a wheelchair. A guy with a bandaged ear. A woman with a snaggletooth that poked out of her lip in a way that reminded me of the way my bumper was jutting out from the fender.

From the doctor’s office we went to a drugstore and waited for the pharmacist to fill our prescription. The big-box pharmacy is the supermarket’s evil twin. The cornucopia and the pharmacopia. The one devoted to the pleasures of the sweet and the savory, the other to the relief of aches and pains. The endless aisles of syrups and salves, capsules and bandages attest to the fact that every single part of us can be injured.

This was the dot connector back to the supermarket parking lot. One day I was reminded of how easily things break. The next day I was reminded of how easily we break.

This was not like me. I’m more often impressed by human resilience than dismayed by human fragility. Maybe it’s my mother’s illness. Maybe I’m anxious about my upcoming test for a possible recurrence of colon cancer. Maybe it was the chilly, gray weather.

A few days earlier, a beautiful May day, the very height of spring, the world seemed a garden, exquisitely wrought. Now it seemed like a junkyard. How quickly we and all our stuff go from shiny and new to dented and dull.

Call it a moment of existential dread (or fear, without the scholar’s gown), a condition for which there is no balm or pill in any of the aisles of the giant drugstore. The restoration of equilibrium resides in this: the appreciation of resilience in the face of fragility.

Or this: The bill to snap my bumper back into place came to $35.