An accident waiting to happen

It's very strange the way the brain works. Some say mine is stranger than most, and judging from a recent incident, I might tend to agree.

A friend and I were sitting on her front lawn. She was telling me about her next door neighbour who is elderly and whose eyesight and reaction times are not as good as they once were. She related two incidents in which her neighbour had had a slight run-in with her: once, he "tapped" her car as he was backing out of his garage, and another time, he bumped into her as she was standing on the pavement between their two townhouses. That time, she flung her grandson out of the way, lost her camera from her hand, and was pushed to her knees by her neighbour's car.

Her next sentence sounded to me like this: it's a ka-TAL-puh-tree (that's an approximation of the phonetic spelling.)

I did what I always do when I hear an unfamiliar word. I started flipping through my mental Rolodex, looking this time for a four syllable word with the stress on the second syllable. Of course, this means that, effectively, I am eliminating all other words that don't fit this pattern.

From the context of our conversation, I thought the word was perhaps related to "catastrophe" because we were talking about her neighbour's driving, tight turn spaces, and backing out of a garage. I flipped to the "cata-" section of my in-brain dictionary, but was coming up with nothing.

Just as I was about to repeat the word in a question form--"Catalpatry?--the conversation switched tracks back to a conversation from the previous day when we had been sitting in exactly the same spot talking about the tulips and other plants in the little garden spot at the front of my friend's house. She had planted a small tree but couldn't remember the name of it.

Well, you guessed it. She had planted a catalpa tree, and she had suddenly remembered the name. And just as suddenly, had catapulted to the previous day's conversation, brought it forward to the present, and announced, "It's a catalpa tree."

I almost drove right into that one. It could have been a catastrophe.