Life, Death, and License Plates

I associated the automobile license plate with a life altering event - not my life, but the life of whoever owned the car.

I was crossing the parking lot of a hospital in Delaware when I noticed the North Carolina license plate.

Funny how the surroundings in which an object is viewed can color the way we react to the object.

Had I seen the same North Carolina license plate on a car parked in front of a restaurant or in the parking lot of a shopping mall, I would have assumed the owner of the vehicle to be on vacation. But here, in a hospital parking lot, I immediately speculated that something exceptionally traumatic or wonderful had occurred to make the owner of the car drive from North Carolina.

Perhaps a close friend or relative had just been diagnosed with a life threatening condition - or perhaps a daughter was giving birth to an older couple's first grandchild. I hoped it was the latter but somehow suspected not.

I don't know why my speculation leaned toward the unhappier of the two. I could try to turn intuition into an exercise in logic. There would be time to celebrate a birth at home, wishes for a quick recovery for something like a broken arm could come in the form of a card or phone call. But a critical, life threatening disease - that required jumping in a car and making a drive across several state lines.

I would rather have speculated on the sex of a newborn, but instead I imagined a father reaching the end of a battle with cancer. I imagined the phone ringing in the North Carolina home at 2 in the morning, a heavy hand patting the night stand in search of the phone, a groggy Hello. All followed by lights flaring to life, clothes hurriedly thrown into a suitcase, and a car backing too quickly out of a garage in the darkest hours of the night.

Hopefully I was wrong.