I was late.

The game was going to tip off at any moment and I was late.  Last night was game two of the NBA playoffs.  I am a fairly rabid Portland Trailblazer fan and I had been invited to a watch party.  The game was starting at any moment… in fact, the ball might already have been in motion.

I was cruising down NE Cesar E Chavez Blvd.  I wasn’t speeding enough that I feared getting pulled over, but I was definitely pushing the pace.  The multi-lane road was filled with medium traffic and the just fading light of evening.  I was only thinking about the game.

That’s when I heard it.  We all heard it.  All twenty or so cars within view heard it.  It was a sound we had all heard thousands of times before… a siren.  I remember looking in my rearview mirror to see if it was coming from behind me.  It wasn’t.  I tried to determine if that particular wail was the sound of an ambulance or a fire truck.  I couldn’t remember.

A half-mile before me there was a small hill that rose slightly and fell.  The rack of lights appeared first.  It was moving fast.

That’s when it happened.  Just like it has happened a hundred times before.  It is an aberration, an anomaly in the human experience.  I found it so shocking and so beautiful that my eyes became wet.

As if cued by a conductor or a choreographer… all twenty cars in unison veered to the curb and stopped.  All agendas were simultaneously put on hold.

Twenty drivers.  We couldn’t talk to each other, how could we?  We were all stuck inside our metal boxes on wheels.  We couldn’t even look into each others’ eyes.  But like a flock of starlings, we all moved in unity out of deference to…

A Stranger.

Someone we did not know.  Someone we would never meet.  We would never meet the person(s) in trouble.  We would never meet the driver of that emergency vehicle.  We would never meet each other.

And yet, for one moment, we all, from our separated consciousness (or was it a collective consciousness, hum?), determined to defy our programming.  The same people who honk their horn if you are half a second late when the light turns green.  The same people who glare when you force your way into the turn lane so you don’t miss your exit.  The same people who scowl and scream in rush hour traffic.

But not at that moment.  At that moment— and it was just a moment, a twenty-second pause from selfishness, from judgment, from tribalism, from agenda tunnel-vision— twenty strangers stopped worrying about being late for a basketball game (or whatever was next on their Google calendar)…

Out of deference for a stranger.