Daily commute offers reflection
by Mary Barrera, Editor-In-Chief

   It's 9:15 a.m., and I have a class in 15 minutes. Thinking I will make it to school on time, I enter 820. Then I see a mobile home taking up both lanes of traffic.

  Because I've become so well educated in college and had extra time while sitting in traffic behind someone's house, I started figuring things out in my head.

  A mobile home trailer traveling south at 60 mph with a northerly wind of 40 mph would make the total wind speed 100 mph hitting the leading side of the house. If a tornado can rip a mobile home into toothpicks and tinfoil, a 100 mph wind can knock one off a trailer.

  It's not just a headache anymore; it's a hazard.

  And when you think about it, a lot of things on trucks can just fly right off.

  I have always been afraid that a trailer carrying new cars would lose one of them onto my car. I guess I have been watching too many chase scenes in action movies, but the fact of the matter is I have a phobia about car carriers.

  My best friend is afraid a ladder will fly off a utility truck and impale her. I don't know what movies she watches, but she will not drive behind a utility truck.

  Most people are afraid of 18-wheelers because semis are involved in so many accidents.

  So I developed a plan for a new law.

  Trucks, especially those with cargo that can fly off the back of a trailer, must drive only late at night. That way, most of us are safely tucked away in bed; traffic is light, and fewer accidents occur.

  Mobile homes would be on location by early morning ready to be staked to the ground, or planted, or whatever the movers do. Everyone's shipments would arrive in the morning and not 5:01 p.m.

  We would experience an overall sense of well-being, and the paranoid could find something else to worry about.

  And what about those out at night? Well, bar patrons would need to sober up before hitting the highway or risk having a ladder decapitate them.

  Then the papers would read:

  "Corvette comes loose and lands in the living room of a mobile home that was following too closely. No one was injured thanks to a new law suggested by Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Barrera, former TCC student."

  I wasn't late for class. Traffic began moving, and the mobile home took off down the road at 75 mph.

  It's a good thing it wasn't windy.