A Friend Indeed...

My Facebook homepage recently alerted me of people that I “may know” out in the virtual ether. Despite the word “people” being plural (meaning two or more persons), I received the name of only one soul who might or might not be familiar to me. And a day or so later this very same person was suggested to me as a potential Facebook friend.

Admittedly, I was intrigued with this person’s peculiar name: “Mosholu Parkway.” The surname was certainly unfamiliar to me. I don’t remember any Parkway family living in the old neighborhood, or a kid by that name in my high school class. I, too, just cannot recall anybody named Parkway that I worked alongside. No, I never had an editor named Parkway parsing my words, either.

Hey, wait just a minute here. Mosholu Parkway isn’t a person after all. It’s a leafy Bronx thoroughfare that I’ve driven on countless times. In fact, it’s where a flesh-and-blood person drove up an entrance incline to the parkway (near the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx) in the wrong lane. Having just purchased a spiffy new set of wheels, he wanted to avoid at all costs a small pothole—“the bump” as it was dubbed—in the wrong but all too literal right lane.

As we inched up the hill on our way home from a Mets' game at Shea Stadium, the car’s two passengers were for—one brief shining moment at least—terrified. Good fortune, though—fate’s huge and generous hand—intervened. We weren’t met at the hilltop by a fellow driver in the left—when we really should have been in the right—lane. Courtesy of a long night game and the lateness of the hour, we were spared a head-on collision on the typically busy Mosholu Parkway—not an actual person, I know, but a friend indeed.