Setting: I’m driving in today on the Westpark Tollway, which was a bad implementation of a good idea. Good idea: high speed traffic flow from the west side of Houston into the Galleria area. Bad implementation: bottleneck the damn thing down to one lane where it goes under the Southwest Freeway.
So I’m stopped in the backup from the bottleneck. I’m not a morning person anyway and my mood has not improved by having to pay a toll to sit dead still on a freeway. I look in the rearview mirror at the car stopped behind me.
I see a very pretty woman, obviously singing along with whatever’s coming out of her speakers and having a great time doing it. She’s not beating time on the dashboard or bouncing all over the seat, she’s just singing. And smiling. What a smile that young lady has. Most folks smile with their mouths. Hers went all the way up into her eyes.
As we inched our way forward, I kept glancing in the mirror and she kept singing. And smiling. This continued until we got past the bottleneck. She continued down Westpark as I exited on Post Oak, and she was still singing. And smiling.
And I was smiling as I took the exit.