Curse of the...Subaru?

In my reckless youth (you know, way back when I was in college and graduate school...oh wait, that doesn't sound so wild and crazy, does it?) I happened to be party to my share of minor fender-benders. Living in the Baltimore/Washington Metropolis, with its jam-packed roads and maniacal drivers, this is not really unexpected. Two of the incidents, unfortunately, were my fault, as I failed to stop in time and rear-ended the car in front of me. The collisions happened at very low speeds, with no injuries, just damage to the cars in question. Why am I dredging this up and reliving it now? Because in the past 7 years, I have experienced two accidents, both of which involved bizarre circumstances, and neither of which in any way could be blamed on me.

The first one occurred in the summer of 2004. The boys and I were in our (previous) Subaru Forester, traveling toward a local mall to shop and have lunch. A pickup truck that was stopped at a red light perpendicular to our path drifted into oncoming traffic and plowed into the front passenger side of our vehicle. Everyone was fine, but I remember having to stand at the side of the road waiting for police and AAA assistance with the boys (ages 4 and not-quite-1 at the time). The driver of the truck reportedly told his insurance company that "a bee flew into the cab" and he took his foot off the brake while trying to shoo it out the window. I thought that sounded weird at the time, but since A) he actually had insurance (yay!) and B) his policy paid for everything, including replacing carseats, I wrote it off as just "one of those things".

The second (hopefully last? Pretty please, O Benevolent Traffic Gods?) odd event transpired yesterday, when I was driving home from work. (In my current Forester....hey, wait a minute, I just realized this may be an alarming trend!) Stopped facing uphill on a 2-lane road at a red light, waiting to turn left, I noticed a disabled vehicle in front of me, with a police car attending to it. When the light turned green, the line of commuters proceeded to skirt the broken-down car by moving into the oncoming lane under the officer's watchful eye. However, the light quickly changed back to red, stranding me in the wrong lane behind a landscaping company's trailer-hauling pickup truck. Obviously, we needed to get back on the correct side of the road and wait for the next traffic-light cycle. That's when things took a sudden turn for the ridiculous. The driver of the pickup truck immediately backed his lawn-mower-carrying metal trailer directly into my front bumper. I was so stunned that I suffered what I came to think of as an "Are you KIDDING Me Delay"--I so very much could not comprehend what the guy was doing, that it took me a second to even blast my horn at him in warning. By then it was too late...as I heard that awful crunch. Then as I slumped in the front seat with my mouth open in astonishment, there was the "What the?" delay while I waited for someone to come investigate. No one got out of the truck. So I inspected the damage myself, then approached the landscaping guys. "Um, you backed right into my car," I calmly-but-incredulously informed them. Their response? "Oh...really?" The most preposterous thing about this whole sad tale (besides their apparent cluelessness and lack of driving ability) is that, if even ONE of them had just stuck his head out the window for a split-second to scope out what was behind them, this would never even have come to pass. Seriously, who doesn't glance to the rear when backing up? Especially when piloting an extra 20-foot steel flatbed? Unbelievable.

Of course the next step was the tedious exchanging of crucial information and the follow-up call to the insurance company to file a report. On the bright side, once again I escaped injury, and my car seems to have sustained only surface-wounds to the front driver's side bumper. But still...I get to deal with the whole "Body Shop" rigamarole. At least I won't be paying for it! And although I generally don't consider myself superstitious, I'm starting to think my next car should NOT be a blue Forester...just in case!