Life's a Gas

I am reminded of two personal gasoline-related incidents as pump prices inch ever closer to the $4-a-gallon mark. One incident involved my car engine once running for five straight hours even though I didn't drive an inch, and the other featured me having a heart attack that I never really had.
Idle Mind
I was on summer vacation from high school years ago and attended a late-night party, then drove home exhausted at 2 a.m. to my parent's house. I parked in front on the street but just left the car running, and closed my eyes to rest for a few seconds.
But those few seconds turned into five hours of deep sleep as I ultimately stretched out on the front seat, with the engine running for the entire five hours. Suddenly at 7 a.m., I heard a loud pounding on the driver's side window.
“Kevin! Kevin!” yelled my panicky mother as she pounded away.
“Huh?” I muttered while struggling to sit up behind the steering wheel.
“Kevin, it's 7 o'clock. It's Saturday,” Mom declared. “You gotta go to work this morning – right now!”
“I do?” I sleepily mumbled. “Okay.”
So since the engine was still running, I just put my car in gear and drove to work.
Serious As a Heart Attack
A couple years back, I was motoring to work one rush-hour morning in my pickup truck, doing 75 in the left lane of the interstate. Suddenly, the engine completely died and I had to deftly maneuver my fast-coasting truck a full three lanes to the right and eventually onto the right shoulder.
Turns out my dilemma was a cracked gas line and an ignition system failure, so I forlornly grabbed my cell phone to call a tow truck. I knew it would take about an hour before the guy could get to me, so I closed my eyes and gently laid my head on the steering wheel to catch a quick nap.
But I was awakened 10 minutes later by the wailing sounds of sirens in the near distance, and looked up through my windshield to see two police cars roaring along the interstate – but going the wrong way.
The vehicles were on the right side of the freeway and proceeding against stopped traffic, and were hastily approaching me from the front. I then glanced in my rear view mirror and noticed that 50 yards back, a third police car had completely halted the rush-hour traffic – causing a major backup.
Oxygen – STAT!
I craned my neck and looked all around to figure the reason for the chaos, as the two speeding police cars screeched to a halt a couple feet from my truck. A patrolman with an oxygen canister jumped from his vehicle and ran to my driver's side window.
“Are you okay?” he asked with a tinge of panic in his voice.
“Uh, I'm fine,” I casually answered after rolling down the window in total confusion. “Why?”
“Because a motorist called and said they saw you slumped over the steering wheel, and they thought for sure that you had a heart attack,” he said.
I embarrassingly explained the situation and it took the officers about five minutes to pack up and leave. In the meantime, the massive line of backed-up vehicles on the interstate seemed to stretch longer than the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
When traffic finally proceeded again, the thousands of cars and trucks began to creep by me – with every driver glancing in my direction to give me the dirtiest of looks.