Passing another car on the highway ain't what it used to be.

For whatever reason, this random thought flashed through Marvin's mind as he tapped the cruise control up a notch or two from 73 to 75.  With fingertip commanding a sedate roar of defossilated power, he eased on past the guy in the right lane, both of them gliding along in the same direction, and Bono on the radio. A few seconds later, he's back in the right lane, like slicing butter.

"And I still haven't found. . . what I'm looking for. . ."

            It wasn't very far from here that he had regularly undertaken a similar maneuver in the '57 Chevy.  Maybe it was even the same spot. The old county road had run along this same route. But back in the day, passing another car on the two-lane was actually a matter of life and death, although you certainly didn't think of it that way; it was just the way automobiles interacted at that time, like ships passing in the night, or in the day.

            But if you do think about it--sixty miles an hour stoked up, for passing purposes,  to seventy or more, and the oncoming car whizzing at probably the same speed--that's a hundred and twenty mph of massive steel and chrome Newtonian force--barreling  down in space and time directly at each other. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure that if the aggressor (the passer) doesn't accurately judge spatial relationships and relative velocities and overtake the passee so as to get back in his lane at the appropriate moment, there could be hell to pay--like the big one, the  that's all she wrote moment and then silence except for, like, Damocles' radio antenna flopping, and no more signals conducting through the warp of black hole space from some distant infinity of the universe.

            I'm damned lucky to be alive, thought Marvin, although there had no doubt been a million and one close calls that he was never even aware of in the intervening fifty years. And to tell the truth, the supposed danger in such an unseemly perilous passing highway encounter didn't hold a candle to what he had lucked out of on D-day at Normandy thirteen years before he even had the Chevy.  Now that... was a bona fide miracle.

            Damn Nazis, what a hell of a mess they inflicted on us. Nevertheless, passing another vehicle these days on the freeway is much safer than what it once was, or so it seems.