We used to sit around the fire in deer camp in the evenings, when everything was quiet, and ask one another, "Why are we still alive?" We based that question on the stoopid things we have done over the span of our lives, and yet, like a Timex watch, we take a lick-en and keep right on ticking:
A.) One of my earliest mistakes was climbing up into my grandmother's Camphor tree, about 9 feet off the ground. I stepped on a dead limb, which broke, and fell head-over-heels striking the concrete bench below the tree with the back of my head and neck and my feet coming down like a pile driver afterward. I heard the bell ring that day.
B.) As children, I had two neighborhood acquaintances, 4th grade school mates, since this, no longer friends or mates, who were in their backyard when I arrived to play with them and their trampoline. They had a water hose running, and we're fiddling with something in the grass. They asked me to hand it to them. I was closest, so I grabbed it. It was an electric motor plugged into a 120 V outlet. I was standing barefoot on the wet ground and that machine lit me up like a lamp. I was not a happy camper. They thought it was funny! I did not play with those boys ever again.
Unfortunately, several years later, one of those two boys inadvertantly killed another boy in their neighborhood playing "pickle" after striking him in the back of the head/neck with a rubber coated hard ball. Children's mistakes happen.
C.) An older man in his PU truck doing what was thought as a dead stick 65+ mph, rear ended my car as I waited at the intersection for the go forward light to change to green. All of a sudden my world got rocked. I was slunk down in the driver's seat of a 4-door Buick Rivera, instead of my own 2-door Opel Kadet Station Wagon. I had begged Mom to let me drive her car that night (my intention was to impress a girl at the college library). Her car probably saved me. I pulled my feet back into the broken Rivera's back window having done a seated "gainer" from the driver's seat during impact. Not a scratch on me. The older gentleman did not survive the ordeal.
