Just for a little warmth

Tomor­row morn­ing there is street clean­ing on the East side of my street, which is where the Moto Guzzi was parked until about a half hour ago. I went out to move the bike and, not­ing the chill in the air, thought that it would be nice to have a fire in my fire­place tonight. I’ve run out of Duraflames, but since I had to move the bike any­how, I thought I may as well go down to Safe­way and pick up a log before retir­ing for the evening.

This all made sense at the time; I can’t bring home a whole case of Duraflames on my motor­cy­cle, but it’s a quick trip to the store and I can eas­i­ly bring home one. I start­ed to see the fol­ly of my ways when I came out of Safe­way to find the sky pour­ing rain down on me. This is some form of self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy: by going out for a firel­og I made sure that I’d be soak­ing wet when I got home and that I’d real­ly be glad to have a fire.

A few blocks from home there was a car stopped diag­o­nal­ly in the mid­dle of an inter­sec­tion. Oth­er cars there had their blink­ers on. The acci­dent must have just occurred because there was no police pres­ence yet. I con­sid­ered stop­ping and even pulled over, but there were bystanders there with cell­phones who were call­ing in the acci­dent. Sat­is­fied that there was noth­ing I could do to help, I pro­ceed­ed on home. Bet­ter to be out of the way if I can’t be helpful.

Two blocks from home, a police cruis­er went through the inter­sec­tion in front of me. That’s when I fig­ured I might be able to be help­ful. I flashed my head­lights to get the atten­tion of the police in the car, but they turned the cor­ner down­hill. I chased after them and near­ly caught up at the bot­tom of the hill. I might have been able to get their atten­tion, but the Guzzi lost trac­tion as I tried to stop. I suc­cess­ful­ly came to a stop with­out dump­ing the bike, but when I was stopped safe­ly enough to try to wave down the offi­cers in the police cruis­er they were already mov­ing through the inter­sec­tion, turn­ing back towards the Safe­way I’d just come from.

I let a taxi go through the inter­sec­tion and then gave chase to the police car. I caught up to them four blocks up where they stopped for a line of cars at a red light. I pulled up next to the dri­vers’ side win­dow by cross­ing the dou­ble yel­low lines where finally—only a block away from Safeway—I got the atten­tion of the offi­cer dri­ving the cruiser.

I prob­a­bly should have guessed, but it turns out the police in the car already knew about the acci­dent. These offi­cers were out look­ing for the oth­er car. Appar­ent­ly it was a hit and run. I did­n’t want to take up any more of their time so I turned around and came back home.

Now I’m home and the bike is under its cov­er, parked where no streetsweep­ers will pass in the morn­ing. The fire is crack­ling in the fire­place and I’m still soak­ing wet. The rain has already stopped. It rained just long enough to cause an acci­dent here in Potrero Hill and get me soaked while I chased after a police car. The fire is warm and quite pleas­ant so this brief sto­ry has a hap­py end­ing. But I sus­pect I might have been bet­ter off if I had­n’t gone out to bring home the log and sim­ply crawled under a blanket.