I’m sitting at a red light falling in love with the passenger in the next car. She’s cute and small and irrepressible, but mostly hidden by the headrest, and dark and coy and mysterious and of completely indeterminate age, and smart! When she turns her head just so, contemplating her driver, I can see enough, through the tinted glass and the relentless glare of the bird-stained windshield, to know she’s curious and contemplative. A brilliant browline crowns a clear and deepset eye of sparkling darkness. I feel you judging me. Love at one car distance is every bit as legitimate as love at a distance of one breath mingling with another, near enough for our tongues to snap like wit. I’ve had the skin-on-skin sort. The varsity variety. I’m not sure it was any better. I’ll catch her eye when I pass alongside, if this maddening gridlock doesn’t unhinge me. I want to tell her this traffic is the worst since cops invented red lights to raise ticket revenues, right? I know. Observations like that should win her heart unless my heart is lying. She’ll be mine to amuse and disappoint in a minute or a mile. But first, eliminate the other driver, who doesn’t deserve or appreciate her. How’s his traffic material? Green light, finally. As our cars pull even, her driver’s head blocks her from offering me her face. To pledge in my direction. With her eyes. That I am not alone in love. Her driver will concede our love is destiny, or regret it. He moves aside, I believe, in surrender; I see her; she is stunning. The most magnificent springer spaniel, dark of brow and bright of eye, purebred of champions clearly, this one, raised from greatness for greatness, vivacious and irrepressible, age approximately three.

Original Copyright © February 10, 2000
Revised Copyright © February 06, 2026