Response to The Man and His Son

     Driving across Montana had not been part of my original route from San Francisco back to Nebraska, but the road had taken me off course the way that I had learned that it could. So there I was, driving my new car on a back road past a gas station when a boy walks into the road so close to my car that I almost hit him.
     Alarmed, I pulled over. I don't know if it was to make sure that he was okay, or to make sure that I was okay, or to make sure that the car was okay, but I pulled over. The boy was still standing right next to the road! It seemed like he had been doing this for a while.
      "Are you okay?" I asked him.
      "Sure," the boy said, looking up at me for a second before looking at the road again. Confused by him and feeling out of my element (after all, I wasn't too many years older than him), I looked around for an adult.
      "Excuse me sir, is this your son?" I asked the man standing closer to the gas station with two motorcycles.
      "Yes, he is," the man answered.
      "Well he could have been killed standing so close to the road like this," I told him as politely but firmly as I could.
       "How could he have been killed?" the man asked. Honestly, this wasn't the reaction I expected from him.
       "I don't know, from the cars!"
       "He would have to be in the road for the cars to hit him. If the cars stay in their prescribed lanes, he would be fine."
       "Well yes, that's true but... shouldn't you be more concerned that he could be hurt?" I asked, exasperated.
       "I am a person who focuses more on the details of how things function than on the big ideas," the man answered philosophically.
      "When the big picture is you son getting hit by a car and dying on the highway, I think that should take prominence," I said rather harshly. Why was this man getting so caught up in unimportant ideas? If there was one thing I had learned out here on the road, it was that you had to focus on the big things (the journey, the sky, the landscape, the purpose) in order to enjoy travel. Otherwise, it was just a series of small annoyances and discomforts.
       "I see your point," the man said neutrally. I turned to see that his son had ceased his game of chicken with the highway and was playing with an anthill on the side of the gas station. The problem I had stopped to rectify having been resolved (and my desire to speak with this man decreasing by the second), I nodded at him and returned to my car, pulling back out onto the road effortlessly.