Wham!

If my friend’s car accident last week served as an answer to a prayer – mine, not hers – it wouldn’t be the first time that particular delivery system was used to send me a message from wherever such messages come. The other time this happened was nine years ago, when I was trying to decide whether to move to Urbana, and the message was “so go already!”

Car accidents have been much too common events in my life. Eight times too common, if I’m remembering all of them. No one who ever rode with me would dispute that I’m a lousy driver. I wouldn’t even dispute it. Yet only two of those eight incidents were my fault. Honest. I’ll prove it.

There was the time that my then 4-year-old daughter and I were on our way from Chicago to Springfield on I-55 (or was that section of highway still called Route 66 back then?) and about halfway there a deer – one that was larger than the Volkswagon Beetle I was driving – leaped out from the side of the road right in front of us. Wham! “Mommy, mommy, look at the big brown dog!” Shock. Surprise that we are still moving. Confusion: what do I do now? Was it really a dog?

OK, I knew it wasn’t a dog. And I soon figured out that we were very lucky, because when it hit my car (I refuse to say that the car hit it) the only point of connection was my driver’s side headlight with the deer’s hip. It was able to finish crossing the road without colliding with any other car and my teeny vehicle, along with the two of us in it, was not crushed into oblivion. Of course, the deer didn’t have insurance, but you can’t win ‘em all.

Later that same year, after we had traded in the Volkswagon for a Ford something-or-other, same daughter and I were crossing an Evanston intersection on a green light and suddenly we weren’t. Crossing, that is. A woman coming the other way, distracted because she was late for the closing on her first house, failed to see her red light in time to stop safely on wet pavement and plowed into us instead. Wham! Seatbelts and child carriers were not required at that time, so my daughter, who was sitting unattached in the front seat, bounced up and down several times, hitting her head against the ceiling of the car each time she went up. Fortunately the hospital found nothing wrong. For those of you who know her, though, now you see where she gets all her bounciness. (Yes, I really said that!)

A couple years later I was sitting – sitting, mind you, not driving – in the correct lane with my left turn signal blinking while waiting to pull into a parking lot when suddenly, wham! Another distracted driver – this time a man driving home from visiting his sister in the hospital -- unexpectedly encountered my car. Totaled it. No injuries.

Fast forward a few more years, but not so far as the everyone-has-a-cell-phone days, and I’m driving home on a very busy street when I get a flat tire. No parking lots or driveways nearby so I had to pull over to the curb and leave the car there with the flashers on while I went looking for a phone. Which put my non-mobile car in a driving lane and ... You guessed it. Along came yet another distracted driver, this time a woman rushing to get home from work who didn’t notice my flashers. Wham!

Now we get back to the prayer answering wham. August 31, 2000. I was living in Galesburg, Illinois at the time and had been thinking about moving away because the economic situation in Galesburg was bad and getting worse. My income came mainly from delivering pizza for Pizza Hut and helping personal care clients, with no health insurance or sick day pay. Grandson #1 was born on July 22, and my daughter was encouraging me to join them in Urbana. It would make a lot of sense to do that, financially and family-wise, since I definitely wanted to be an everyday grandma. However I had moved to Galesburg to help establish a Bahá'í community. After several years and a lot of hard tests, I was reluctant to leave because some good things were happening – monthly race unity potlucks, for example – so decided to stay there and re-think the relocation idea in a few months.

On August 31 I was driving back to Pizza Hut after a delivery, and getting ready to ease over into the left turn lane, while at that same moment a Papa John driver was coming out of a KFC parking lot and trying to get across two lanes of traffic in order to turn left in the opposite direction. The woman in the car ahead of me wanted to be nice so she slowed down and waved at the Papa John guy to go ahead and pull out in front of her. At that point the left turn left hadn’t opened up yet so there was no one on her left. But then, suddenly, it did and I was. Wham! Fast Food Hell!

August 31 was the day my lease was supposed to end, and I wouldn’t even have been in Galesburg if I had decided to go ahead with the move. Instead I was still there, only now with a totaled vehicle and a job for which a car was an absolute necessity. But did I pay attention? Nope. I took my insurance settlement and bought another car, an older one that I could purchase outright without payments. This was about the only smart move I made.

Because eight days later, my “new” car was parked in front of my apartment building at about 2:00 a.m. and I was in bed, having come home from a delivery shift not long before, when a neighbor came pounding on my door to tell me my car had been hit. I could barely comprehend the message. Just sort of staggered around in a daze while putting on clothing of some sort and crawling down two flights of stairs to find the way too familiar scene of police lights flashing and another totaled you-know-what. This time the other driver was distracted by an overload of alcohol consumption. He was a young man driving his dad’s now defunct car, one considerably newer than mine, and when I came out of the building he was sitting on the curb hunched over with his head in his hands, the picture of absolute hopelessness.

Please note, by the way, that this was the third time I had been in a car accident without actually being inside a car. Gotta be a record!

Same story, next chapter. I had no vehicle, but still had a job that that required one. If I stayed in Galesburg, that is. But did I pay attention? Nope, I went car shopping again, only this time with little success. I had to shop locally and fast since every day without a car was a day without income. Galesburg is a small town, and all I could quickly find was a Crown Victoria. In other words, a BIG car. It ran, though, and cost a bit less than my new insurance payment, plus the owner promised that it had good gas mileage.

Good gas mileage, right. That car literally cruised down the street sucking up gas stations whole. I would fill the tank and then watch the needle move from F to E as I was driving. And this was the same week that gas prices shot up all over the country, including in Galesburg. But did I pay attention?

Yes, I did. It seemed clear that I was being not so gently pushed out of Galesburg, that those two car accidents plus the Crown Victoria plus the gas price spike amounted to a clear warning to get-out-of-Dodge.

Or maybe I was just afraid to stay. Who knows what would happen next?

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