either an obituary or a comeback-in-waiting?

In college on my corner of my freshman floor I was notorious for sleeping through my alarm clock in the morning. It would be going off, waking up everyone in a few doors radius from me, except for me; what we also discovered was that, even if my alarm clock couldn't wake me up, simply opening my door (and eventually, banging on it) would make me shoot up out of my bed.

This morning, a loud rapping of our front door made me bolt up from my slumber and drew me groggily to the front door. The officer at the door opened with, "Are you the owner of a red Volkswagen Cabrio?" And it all went downhill from there.


It appears that someone was driving up 22nd street last night/this morning at a high rate of speed and somehow missed the bright red car parked (legally) on the left side of the one-way street, hit the car right on the right rear wheel, shoving the car forward one whole parallel parking spot, before sliding his (or her?) car all the way across the passenger side and coming to a stop barely in front of our car. We're no Sherlocks, but we suspect that the words "drunk" or "stolen" will be oft-repeated in the police report. The fact that the driver fled the scene would tend to nudge us in that direction...

We will be taking (well, towing) Sharon's car to the shop in the morning and finding out (quickly, we hope) whether we should expect to wait a few weeks while it's fixed or whether we need to start car shopping. The former option would probably be the most favorable, I think, but in truth the two of us think the car is totalled. We've found ourselves pointing out cars we like, lately, a little bit like drive-by window shopping; perhaps it was more prophetic than we'd ever envisioned. Too bad it's had to come about in this way.

We'll know more details tomorrow...