my hero

I normally reserve this blog for stories about Ada but this is a crazy family story that needs to be documented for posterity.

Last night Elliot, Ada and I did our normal Thursday night bike ride and then went to get some dinner at a plaza near my work. We go into the pizza place - order our food and have 20 minutes to kill so we decide to walk across the parking lot, which is down hill (this is important in a second) to another store. As we are walking I hear what sounds like an electric car going by - only it is moving backwards, it wasn't an electric car - it was an old Volvo station wagon, and there was no one in the car. Being the hero that he is, Elliot ran after the car, tried to open the door... of course it was locked. So he turned to brut strength and tried to slow it down himself. When that didn't really work he started shouting, louder than you may think Elliot can shout, at the car that was in a direct line for a collision with the runaway Volvo. Just as that car started to slow down, the Volvo also miraculously hit a bit of an up slope and slowed just enough that Elliot was able to finally make some progress on slowing down the Volvo, sparing the car from crashing into the building not 10 feet away. Elliot was then able to push the car back into the aisle of the parking lot so that it wasn't blocking traffic and we started to assess what had just happened.

Turns out, some kid had pulled into a parking spot at the top of the parking lot. Forgotten to put the car in park, but had removed the keys and locked the car before he headed into the Pei Wei for some dinner. Since the car was parked at the top of a hill it slowly started to move backwards, picking up momentum as the hill got steeper. It was about half way down the hill when it passed us.

This was the perfect storm of events which allowed Elliot the opportunity to show his inner hero. The car was luckily parked in line with an aisle in the parking lot. Had it been one spot to the left or right it would have hit another car, or us as we were walking down the other side of the aisle. We almost decided to go to another pizza place that was more on our way home - had that happened we would never have had the chance to save the car. I was holding Ada, which freed Elliot up for hero duty. And had the driver of the Volvo not been such an oblivious kid we would never have this crazy tale to tell.