Reality is stranger than fiction, or at least, it's capable of matching a scene from everyday life with a sequence with a surprising ending. It happened this summer, in a village in the Pyrenees, at the beginning of a placid afternoon. A child riding a bike whizzed around a narrow corner, causing a corresponding scare to a neighbor who bumped into him and, apparently, knew the child. The woman admonished him, without shouting, but very seriously, in this way: "Be careful with the bike, because if you run over an old lady..." I'll leave the sentence there. How could I continue? "Could you hurt her badly? Could you kill her? Will the Mossos d'Esquadra and an ambulance come?" Well, no, the warning was: "Be careful with the bike, because if you run over an old lady, your parents will have to pay a fortune.""lots of money in the old lady."
I didn't see that ending coming, much less expressed in these words, which made me laugh. Beyond the fact that the first thing that crossed his mind was hitting an old woman, he didn't give him common-sense advice ("when you can't see if someone's coming, don't speed") or advice from a veteran driver ("when you get to a corner, brake"), but rather the projection that the worst thing he could give the ship is that the worst thing that could happen to the kid is that. Frankly, I didn't think the economic approach to the consequences of the imaginary collision would help the kid internalize a lesson in basic road safety. Rather, it came across as a lesson in adult priorities.
