Another Friday Afternoon

Today was beautiful so I went for a bike ride (to be honest I do that every day unless it is seriously nasty).  I was in one of my city's oldest neighborhoods, with most of the houses built a century ago.

I saw two people walking toward me in the middle of the street.  This wasn't a dangerous place to do that; it was a quiet residential area.  

It was a man and a woman, both in their thirties, approximately the same in height and weight. The man had a small dog on a leash.

The woman was screaming -- no, shrieking -- at the top of her lungs.

"Get in the freaking car!  I'm not kidding! Get in the freaking car!"

Except she didn't say freaking, of course.

The man said "I'm not going anywhere with you!"

This discussion continued as a I rode past. I stopped a block away and tried to decide whether this merited a 9-1-1 call. I hadn't seen any physical contact, or heard any true threats.

While I considered an auto drove past me and I realized it was the couple in question.  The man had entered the freaking car.  I knew it was them because the woman was still shrieking, although I couldn't hear what she was saying.

Okay, the man had made his decision.  I rode on. 

A block later I had another thought: What if the genders had been reversed?

People of similar  age, height, and weight, but it was a man demanding that a woman get into a car.  What would I have done then?

I had no doubt: I would have called 9-1-1 and then gone over and asked the woman if she was okay.

Why in that order? Because I haven't been in a fist fight in sixty years, and I lost the last one.  Police backup would have been very useful.

Would I really have done that?  I think so but it is very easy to be brave when the threat is gone.

Will this find its way into my fiction someday?  Probably.

Anyway, that was my afternoon.  How was yours? 

Oh, and you might want to watch this video.  What they show is real, and it has worked.