Monday, November 12, 2012

In which we almost all die

Boy did we have an interesting weekend.  Kenny and I watched Forrest Gump for like the 120th time and I got caught up thinking about that part at the end where Forrest is standing at Jenny's gravesite resolving whether things are destined like his Mama says or whether things just happen like Lieutenant Dan says.  He says "Maybe it's both" and I thought, well I guess maybe there's something to that.

Anyway, Olivia was at the church riding a mechanical bull until midnight so we were up late.  Inbox me for more info on that.  We couldn't sleep in because Olivia had a swim meet in Chattanooga on Saturday and if you've never been to one of those, it's such a fun thing to watch.  Kids of all sizes and abilities getting a feel for competition and kindred spirit.  She had some successes and some challenge and we got to watch a friend's first race. It was great. We left there to travel farther north so that we could see Christopher in Monteagle for dinner. Those kinds of days, where you get to do all the things you love best are just marvelous.  We sang the SpongeBob "Best Day Ever" song a few times in the dark on the 2 hour drive back home.

So I'm driving in Chattanooga and it's getting later and I pull my hand from Olivia's because it's a little curvy and traffic is more dense that I would expect and at 70+mph I felt compelled to have both hands on the wheel.  The concrete divider wall always makes me nervous, but I'm in the fast lane going fast anyway.  Neither Olivia nor Kenny saw the spare tire (WHEEL AND TIRE) careening out of nowhere towards us, but I did and I had long enough to assess that it wasn't a strip of tire from a truck and there was going to be no way to swerve and avoid it.  The Driver's Ed move "Blood On the Highway" can prepare you for a lot, friends, but dealing with heavy objects flying at you is something you can only learn first hand. Let me take a second here and make a point:  I used to label myself a "loopholer" because I was always looking for the way out of a difficult or confrontational situation, but I've learned in the last few years that some trouble you just have to hit head on and so if there's a concrete wall to my left and lots of cars to my right, you can bet this girl is just gonna take my chances and nail any son of a bitch tire that comes at me.

Because my panic mode always means I become frozen and mute, no one else was prepared for the impact.  The first jolt of metal on metal was more jarring than I could have imagined. When the car lifted into the air all I could think was don't hit the wall, don't hit the wall, don't hit the wall.  I felt like hitting it would mean spinning into other traffic and that's something that's for sure gonna end worse than it already looked like it was.  I remember Olivia and Kenny's screams, pavement, jolting. The second impact I think we all thought was a following car or the wall, but it turned out to be us landing from our vertical forward pitch on the front bumper.

I do not remember how I navigated us through the other lanes and off the exit ramp, but I remember lots of are you oks are you oks are you oks.  And despite the ensuing hyperventilating, we were somehow okay.  The truck driver who also pulled over said he'd seen it in his rearview and couldn't believe we weren't injured and that the car was somehow still drivable.  He used lots of colorful language to express his dismay at our survival. He'd hit the spare tire first and flung it with God knows how much force in our direction.  It wasn't his fault, of course, but he was kind enough to stop and confirm that we'd actually just flown for  a few seconds.

Somehow we putt-putted our way home in shock, all three holding hands the last 60 miles. It was later that all the questions came like, "What if the airbags had gone off?" I would have definitely not been able to keep it in the road. "What if I'd had only one hand on the wheel?" Swerve and hit that wall, spinning into God knows what.  "What if I hadn't had to hit a drawer that fell off a truck on 285 a few years ago and hadn't known that sometimes hitting something straight on is the least awful option?  What if that tire had been flung higher and hit the window? What if? What if? What if?"

And then there are the bigger questions that arise after a car accident like, "What if we were actually spared for some reason? What if one of us has work to do that influences the life of someone else? What if these sort of incidents are supposed to serve as wake up calls for whatever we ought to be doing?"

So we're back to Forrest Gump.  Now a lot of folks would say God spared us for some higher purpose, but I'm not sure that's a good thing to say because what do you say of the person who died in an accident 15 minutes later? That God couldn't think of any more use for his life?  That's simplistic and I think that's not what you'd mean at all so let's set that aside and look at one of my favorite ideas.  Chaos Theory posits that all things, big and small, are RELATED, like intricate spiderwebs, and that all events influence all other events, for better or for worse, which makes the human need and ability to connect those dots and understand things historically, contextually, a fascinatingly beautiful talent.  These threads answer a lot of our "what ifs" and help us impose order on a delicately connected universe, but it doesn't require that we qualify some events as "GOOD" and others as "BAD" so much as they are just things which happen and exert influence.  It's what we do with that circumstance and connection that puts us in alignment with whatever our faith is, so don't think I'm leaving any Higher Power out of the equation.  So maybe Forrest is right.  A person's life is influenced by both greatly significant and seemingly insignificant things that extend all the way through time.

By all accounts, the three of us had a much greater chance of being injured or dead than we had of walking away from Saturday night unscathed.  So I'm looking at all that unfolded, my telling Olivia that I had to drive for a while with two hands, my earlier experience with hitting flying objects head on, my airbags not deploying and I am thinking that the only possible way to feel is grateful.  I'm grateful for whatever haphazard or intentional events lined up to make sure we made it home together and safe Saturday night.  I'm terribly grateful for more time and for the reminder that more time is not guaranteed.

I took the car in for repair this morning. It's gonna be expensive because it looks like I broke just about everything under a car that you can break and still putter home.  It's a repair bill I am happy to pay.

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