The difference between tragic and stupid

A few weeks ago a Minneapolis woman driving westbound on Lake Street after midnight hit and killed a man standing at a bus stop.

Sad yet boring.

The few of us who relish those kinds of small events assumed that public death after midnight meant lowlife, and moved on to the next item of accident and mayhem in the online Strib.

But then it turned out to be interesting.

The man was 48, jobless, and lived alone with his widowed mother in the lower middle-class neighborhood where he died. He'd gone out on foot to buy a pack of cigarettes; he didn't drive because of previous drunk-driving problems.

The woman was 49, and lived with her husband and children in fashionable and wealthy East Isles. She'd been returning home from St. Paul where she'd gone to a party to celebrate her daughter's graduation from St. Paul Academy. The car was an Audi. She was so drunk she'd fallen asleep at the wheel. She'd been in treatment before for substance abuse.

And everyone either knew her, or knew someone who did.

By everyone I mean the social class that sends its kids to St Paul Academy, or Blake, or, as I do, Breck. I'm not rich, but most of the parents I know are, and they were abuzz about poor Kirsten Driscoll, what a tragedy it was for her, how she'd ruined her life.

I have to admit that, even though I didn't know Kirsten Driscoll, those were my thoughts also. It took a few hours before people realized their reaction was inappropriate. Uh-oh, a man is dead, and maybe that's worse than doing something pathetically stupid that will be embarrassing at parties for the rest of time.

And then, maybe because the Strib writes about the bad behavior of new money but not old money, the story disappeared. I've been waiting for weeks now for the "Parallel Lives" feature to appear, the one where we track the 48-year old victim and his 49-year old killer in order to dramatize the ironies of their different paths through life, culminating in their fateful final meeting.

I'd like that because it would give me a good chuckle, and release me from that scared feeling I now have every time I get behind the wheel of my BMW. Am I about to ruin my life?