En route to work one nondescript night in the 1990's, I experienced something akin to losing one's mind, a sort of insanity, an inability to escape a daydream-like state...

I put the car into reverse and turned the wheel to the left...

My thoughts ran to the coming unavoidable encounter with my grandparents. We'd had a falling out after I came back from Europe with an earring. “Look like Negro!”, had been the Slavic-accented reaction from my grandfather, that ignorant old-world bastard who had survived a Nazi concentration camp.

Without realizing it, I had stopped. I turned the wheel in the opposite direction and pulled up...

My thoughts ran to the questions I'd be asked by the gabby old ladies who worked on my floor. I figured Jewel, an intelligent but uneducated older black woman with a prominent facial burn scar, would have the gumption to first broach the topic. Sure enough, the first day I was back at work, her public and benevolent yet blunt ice-breaking query, “so, they bury him yet?”, etched itself forever into me.

It seemed I had stopped again, short of where I needed to be to turn. I started again to pull up...

I thought about what my dry-eyed mom would be thinking and doing now, about 10 minutes after meeting me en route to work, about 10 minutes after telling me that my dad had committed suicide. She worked at the same home, a shift earlier. She told me that I was cleared from work this night.

My eyes focused and I applied gas, but the car didn't move as I'd expected. It wasn't in reverse anymore. Realizing that my angle was wrong, I turned the wheel the opposite direction...

I thought about my three younger Middle School-aged siblings. How would they react? What would the long term implications be? How would they handle the awkward probings from their peers?

I had stopped once again, thanks no doubt to a subconscious brain-algorithm which knew that running into the back sides of Mexican Restaurants was a bad idea. Embarrassed even though I was alone, I managed to finally pull out of the narrow lot where I'd heard the news.

I was so severely distracted that it took me over 20 minutes to back my car out. Surely this must be something like losing one's mind, when a simple task becomes a disjointed mess of brain spasms and day-dreams. Surely to an observer, I must have seemed a loon as my car started and stopped, pulled up and back again, as someone incapable of operating a motor vehicle.

Luckily, it quickly wore off.