Wednesday: I might have started this post with something along the lines of Things were quiet yesterday in a neighborhood quite shaken up by Sunday's shootings -- It's rainy with intermittent bits of sunshine... Except that's not the way it was. At least not at one in the afternoon when there were huge banging sounds on the street as if a dumpster were tumbling -- it was a car out of control, with trash bins flying and then screams. I ran outside in my socks and saw first my neighbors' iron gate crashed in and blue and black bins toppled in the street. A little bit further down, a car was crashed into a chain link fence and another of my neighbors lifted a small child out of the car. I had a sick feeling of dread when I saw that and stopped in my tracks almost involuntarily. But it turned out the driver -- an elderly woman -- and her grandson were unhurt, and the car had missed my neighbor, whose screams I had heard a few moments earlier.

An older Honda Civic now rested against a pushed-in link fence with a black garbage bin tilted against the hood. The driver was disoriented and asked frantically, "Did I hit anyone?" It seems that she had hit the gas instead of the brake. The next hour was confusion. I watched as various police officers, paramedics and firemen asked the driver, who is 71 and lives in Silver Lake, the same questions over and over. A helicopter came and went. Over a dozen neighbors came and went. A couple who live close by told me that on Monday night a drunk driver crashed into their house, which abuts an alley-like driveway. They said things were going awry in Echo Park. They certainly were awry on our street, and we now had the loop-de-loop black treadmarks to illustrate the point.

A little later, the woman, a Filipina grandmother whose name is Lydia, was still agitated. A fireman tried to calm her, saying "no one was hurt. This [the car] this doesn't feel anything. It's just a car. It can be fixed." But she didn't seem consoled. She is diabetic, and her blood sugar was 170. She has no health insurance. The car had to be moved somewhere. The fences had to be fixed. Her grandson was badly shaken.

She reviewed with me what had happened. She said it all had gone by so fast. She lost control of the car, but the garbage bins had slowed her down. "I was saved by the garbage," she told me.

As I went back inside to get a sweater for the driver, a cop was following the treadmarks where they went up on the sidewalk and into the street.

"I wish someone had seen it," he said to me. "I can't figure out what happened."

A little while later, the driver's daughter arrived (from Lancaster) to pick her up. (Her grandson had been taken to school in the meantime.)

That was Wednesday. Today is Thursday. It's cool and sunny -- gloriously so -- and, except for the crashed-in iron fence and shattered fence posts across the street, it's quiet and things look normal.