Oh where, Oh where did it go?

I have gotten into the habit of keeping paper and pens on the passenger seat of my car. Seems many poems want to be born while I drive. It can be annoying when I am in the fast lane and suddenly a poem pops into my head; I am lucky if I can remember it long enough to pull over to the side of the road to write it down. There was a time when I would not do this: a poem would be born while I drove and then I would play with it for awhile and then let it go on its way. When I first started writing poetry, that was fine -- the poems were not that good, and it was fun to let them ramble in my head like bowling pins.

Eventually though, the inevitable happened: while driving down the road on another long distance jaunt, a poem came into my head and it blew me away. The beauty of it was astounding, and I could not get to the side of the road fast enough to write it down. When I pulled over, the first thing I did was look for a pen -- checked the seats, the floor, the glove compartment, all the while repeating the poem in a fevered rush aloud and in my head so as not to forget it. Then I got out of the car and checked under the seats and under the cushions -- still no pen or pencil -- checked the trunk of the car and found nothing. Then I had it. I rushed to the backseat, pulled out my son's activity bag, and took a crayon out. Then I realized I had no paper, and since crayon doesn't really work on skin, I went to the window and proceeded to write the poem. It filled all the side windows and the rear one -- I was on a roll. With the poem not yet finished, I started to write on the door panel. By the time I was done I had gone through four crayons, and all but the front window was filled with colored wax words.

Relieved that I had gotten the poem down before it was forgotten, I got into the car and proceeded to drive. I found that a calm had descended upon me as the words quickly left; I was very glad I thought of the crayons. Unfortunately for me, as I relaxed into the mood of driving, it suddenly started to rain. Not the soft comforting rain that invigorates, but the downpour that is so thick you can't see ten feet in front of you. Twenty minutes of hard rain later, and with a headache the size of Texas, I pulled into a gas station to get some coffee and fill the gas tank. As I stood at the gas tank I knew something wasn't right, but it took me a few minutes to figure out what it was. Everything looked just as it should, and for some reason that bothered me very much. Going to the register I suddenly stopped and turned around to see that the reason for my concern was all too visible - or rather not visible. Not one fleck of crayon was still on the car, not even the waxy residue you usually see. I went to pay for the gas and bought some pens and a notebook. I think I sat in my car for an hour, trying to remember all that I had written, but not even one line would rematerialize. Never again would I leave my house without my notebook and pen! To this day, I still think it was the best poem I have ever written, and there is no way I will ever again be in a plight where the poem is lost due to the lack of paper or a pen.