It's also the day before my twenty-eighth birthday.
Okay, I didn't need to know that you're younger than I am. Really. (32 this December, you young whippersnapper. Don't talk back to your elders!)
When I was fifteen, I lived just down the road a bit from my Uncle Bill. Bill had very recently divorced his first wife, Laveda. Not very far from both Bill's house and ours was the printing business that Bill inherited (well, bought) from my grandfather.
One night I went out bike riding with my friend Gordon. The whole neighborhood is a warren of little suburban side streets connecting to collector streets.
So I'm riding my bike. Meanwhile, ex-aunt Laveda is looking for Bill, angry about something. She didn't find him, which apparently did not improve her mood. She went roaring up one of those collector streets at 45 miles per hour, according to the skid marks. It was dusk. She was angry. I was young, and clumsy. Go on, predict the end.
I don't really remember the accident--the last thing I remember clearly is riding around the little suburbia around our house. Apparently I whipped out in front of Laveda and she slammed into me and my bike. The front end of her Honda Civic was wrecked. My bike went under her front wheels, and I went head over teakettle over the hood, slamming my head into her windshield, breaking both my legs and cracking my collarbone.
I remember having a vivid dream of learning to ride my bike at my grandma's house. I think the connection was gravel: in reality I was lying in the gravel by the side of the road, in the dream I was lying in the gravel in grandma's drive way.
In reality, I was screaming obscenities and random German (I'd just taken a year of it). Spent a week in the hospital, a month in a wheelchair, and three months on crutches. My left leg was really shattered--they put it back together with a metal bar with seven holes in it, through which they screwed seven screws
right into the bone. I still have it, I call it my erector set.
I understand that feeling of being jumpy. In that wheelchair I felt like the world's biggest pinball. Coming home from the hospital a car would turn in front of us, oh, say, five blocks away and I'd panic.
Wonderful story--now that it's over. Reports of serious mental damage are greatly exaggerated.
Really.
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Mark Morgan:
mark_morgan@yahoo.com
http://www.VoicesOfUnreason.com
A resource for writers and readers of all stripes.
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Isaac Asimov: "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny....'"
