Things that make me go hmm.

I experienced a funny thing late Friday afternoon driving back from the mall. It was typical post-workday traffic with loads of cars. I was waiting to get onto the road home and glanced in the rearview mirror at the vehicle behind. I saw a sun-darkened construction guy still wearing just his high-vis safety vest over bare arms and shoulders. He glistened pinkly like he’d had a hot day with his sunglasses pushed up on the top of his head. There were white earbuds jammed into his ears, and he had an intense glare going from behind the wheel of the late model SUV. Then he pulled out a duster - not just a cloth, but a full foot long white puff on a stick and began furiously poking it at the dash and console of the car. It was such a bizarre image that my brain went berserk, two things cycling rapidly in circles around my cranial cavity.
Firstly, what was the story? Was he borrowing the family vehicle for work that day and worried about returning it dusty? Was he always this concerned about the cleanliness of his cars? Had he taken it for a quick wash only to realize the interior was a bit tatty and wanted to even the score? So many questions were bouncing around while I tried to rationalize the image in my head. I was flummoxed.
The second thing that occurred was I began obsessing about the duster. Was I missing something? Did people drive around with a duster in their car for just such particulate emergencies? It seemed like a dusty car was a thing. After all, a quick glance at my vehicle confirmed that dusting was overdue. Maybe everyone should be driving around with a duster in their car to keep the dust down. Was I being shown a cosmic sign that achieving a new standard of tidiness was only a convenient duster away? This missing information was completely overloading my synapses.
I struggled to put the matter away so I could concentrate on the traffic and forced my eyes forward as we crawled up to the lights. Then we were stuck again waiting for the next green. I let myself glance at the mirror again.
The duster was back. Now he was manically shoving it into all the crevices of the interior within reach. He appeared completely fixated on eradicating every mote in sight. I wanted to jump out and ask him what on earth was so vital about a dust-free car that he would expend so much energy at the end of a sweltering workday. Was this duster a tool from work being used to remove evidence so he could return the vehicle with his wife never knowing he’d taken it out on a job? What if he’d stolen the car and was removing forensic evidence? It was just a weird enough picture that it was a possibility worth considering.
The light changed and I went straight while he turned right. All the way home I wondered what had just happened. Did I need to consider putting a duster in my car to test my theories? Maybe I would reach a new level of inner peace if I didn’t have to see dust on the dash while driving. It seemed like a revolutionary concept. But what if it was something else? I had too little information to make sense of what I had just seen. So many options and nothing definite was coming to me.
Then I began wondering about my reaction to the incident? Did anyone else do this? I had probably spent nearly 10 minutes pondering the need for a duster in a car. Perhaps I was the mystery here. Maybe the things that make me go, “Hmm,” are just plain odd. I’ll never know.