What fell on us from the sky

iguel loves dinosaurs,” said the big kid, suddenly a little sad her kindergarten classmate wasn’t with us as we settled into what Google said would be a 90-minute drive through “heavy traffic, as usual” from our winterbreak week at Grandma Boo-Boo’s home in Orange County, Calif., to the footprints at the terrible lizards’ old haunt in La Brea.

The big kid was in her car seat in its usual drivers-side spot in the giant Chevy Tahoe we’d been upgraded into, since the rental place was out of everything else on the holiday weekend. The little kid desperately wanted her car seat in the middle, next to her sister. Why not. That left Boo-boo with them in the back, me riding shotgun, and my wife behind the wheel.

“The dinosaurs are all dead now,” the big kid was explaining. “The asteroid killed them.”

“Guys! Guys! Guys!” said the little one, in counterpoint. “It’s my turn to talk.” BOOM! Something burning my eyes and a huge spider’s web where the road had been unspooling.

Both kids screaming, asking what happened. Boo-Boo’s hands brushing off their hair and faces and clothes.

My wife navigating freeway traffic to steer us to an exit. Me with my hands to the spider web to try and block the crazy airflow and keep more glass from flying into the car.

Off the highway, my wife flagged down a sheriff’s car and that officer called in a California Highway Patrol car. The patrolman, officious and a little bored, asked a few questions, then sat in his car filing a report while we were on the phone with the insurance company.

Boo-Boo had the kids in the Burger King across the street by the time that her ex, my wife’s dad — who we’d had a tough time connecting with ahead of the trip — happened to drive by, on his way to work, then turned around to see if it really was his Brooklyn expat daughter in an El Monte gas station talking with a cop. “One in a billion,” he kept saying. I took a few pictures, and thought about what a gift this was for all of us to somehow be alive and intact and also a bit about what a gift this was for me from the column gods.

I kicked myself for writing too soon, just after Trump won the presidency, about the Flitcraft Parable. That’s the scene, cut from the film, that philosophy students still study in the book of “The Maltese Falcon,” where Sam Spade tells about a wife hiring him to track down her husband, a previously steady man who up and vanished one day. Turns out a beam had fallen from a construction site and nearly hit him, and he’d had some epiphany and took off to start a new life and then a new family, not much different from his old ones.

Spade concludes: “He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

Maybe it was noirs, or 9/11, or New York’s endless ordinary tragedies, but I think I’d adjusted to things falling from the sky long before something hit our car window.

That something turned out to be a greasy piece of pipe, about eight inches long and twice as many pounds, that my wife found in the little one’s seat a half hour after we’d pulled over. As he wrapped it in a napkin, the Highway Patrol officer said that these things happen, had been happening a lot around there in fact. Most likely some teenager on an overpass, or maybe something left loose at a construction site.

My wife kept checking on the little one after that, to see if she’d somehow been hurt but couldn’t express it. None of us could figure how that pipe ended up in her seat, unnoticed, after it must have gone through a hole under the spider web that we also hadn’t noticed until finding the pipe.

What a mess. What a miracle. What the hell?

So much for dinosaurs. When we finally made it back to Boo-Boo’s house, we gave the girls a bath to wash out any remaining glass and give them another onceover.

Not even a scrape, so we took them to an open-air mall with a ferris wheel, and after an hour or so there wound up in a big, familiar fight about whatever it is adults fight about. My end of it: I love you so much and I’m so glad we’re all alive and intact and since we are, could you try answering your phone for once before leaving me with the big kid while we’re all hungry and the restaurants are closing? This is why I can’t find time to write a decent column, let alone a book.

Hours after the BOOM! the same life.