The other day when I was out on my early morning walk, I happened to walk by a fork in the road. It was just there, in the middle of the road, tines up. And it happened to be directly in front of several not-quite-middle-school kids who were on the side of the road waiting for their bus. I stopped, took a couple steps backwards, and used my foot to brush-kick the fork over to the curb. The fork complained in a metal-on-pavement clangy whine.

“No one should run that over now,” I said, as much to myself as to the kids in the grass.

“Is that a fork?” one of them asked as he took a step closer and stretched his neck out to see what was resting just beyond the curb.

“Yes,” I replied. “Kind of silly, isn’t it? A fork in the road?” I would’ve kept going, pushing the puns, but I have enough experience with kids these days to know that wordplay is not really something that most families engage in anymore. In fact, conversation among family members is something that doesn’t happen nearly as much as it should thanks to all of the distractions of life.

As I walked on, I could hear the boy in the background yelling to his mother. “Hey mom! There’s a fork over here! Can you believe that?”

How sad, I thought, that he missed such a great opportunity to expound on the fork and its location. Meanwhile, as I walked, my mind was racing with possibilities. A fork in the road! How odd would it be if you had to tell someone you popped your tire on a fork in the road?