Cup of Joe Near miss signals road trip It only takes a heartbeat to become a traffic fatality and just another statistic. On a road trip up to South Georgia to see family recently, I thought I was about to become both. I won’t use the old cliché “I saw my life flash before my eyes,” but I do think I saw the Grim Reaper’s triumphant grin for a split second. The result was enough to leave my knees quaking, my heart stuttering and my stomach doing cartwheels for the next few minutes. Thank the Lord for guardian angels. I keep mine busy 24-7, it seems. It also made me take serious stock of some things but more about that farther along here. My hat’s off to our high school driver’s education teacher who drilled defensive driving into our airy teenage heads. Plan ahead, think ahead, look ahead and anticipate what the other driver is doing, was her mantra. Thankfully, I didn’t skip that class much. I was heading toward Hilliard on Highway 108 to pick up U.S. 1 North up to Waycross where my dad, my brother and one of my sister’s lives. My other sister was coming from Valdosta around the same time. The cutoff to Hilliard can be tricky. Lots of curves and plenty of drivers who like to pass on those curves. I was driving with my eyes way down the road when I saw a pickup truck towing what appeared to be a homemade trailer with high sides meeting me. The driver appeared to be moving along at a pretty good clip. All of a sudden, I heard what sounded like a loud bang and watched horrified as the trailer broke free of the hitch and took off on its own journey – in my general direction. And then, as suddenly as it had broken free, the trailer lurched to the right and careened off the road, colliding with a road sign or something and shattering into a bazillion pieces. I’ve survived a few bad brushes over the years, including a heart attack, a mini-stroke and two different operations to put stents in my clogged cardiac plumbing and I usually joke that I figure it’ll be my ticker that eventually puts me on the dirty side of the turf. And that’s okay. We all have to die of something. But being harpooned head-on by a dang rickety runaway trailer isn’t on my bucket list of groovy ways to check out, if you know what I mean. The deathly quiet moments after the near miss, when I could hear my own breathing and my heart thudding away in my chest, were sobering. I have an aunt whom I’m very fond of. She’s my mom’s sister and she’s less than ten years older than me and we’ve always been pretty close. For some reason, it occurred to me that we’d not talked or seen each other for a good while. When I finally calmed down, I called her and we had a long chat, ending with me making a promise I intend to keep of going up to visit her in the near future. And while I was at it, I suggested we take a trip to the little South Georgia town where my mom my aunt and uncle and grandparents lived and just sort of spending the day looking around, maybe making a trip to the cemetery to see my grandparents’ graves. And I’ve got a couple of childhood friends who I think still live there I’d like to see again, too. That really got me to thinking. I have old classmates in Georgia and North Carolina and an old college pal in East Tennessee I’ve thought of visiting and even halfway planned to go visit at some point. Whenever I get a chance. Which, as is the case with most of us, is just another way of saying, maybe I will but maybe I won’t. We’ve talked back and forth on Face Book and the telephone and we talk about seeing each other again but it’s just one of those things that sometimes never happen. But driving down the road with another near miss behind me, I made a vow that I will go and see my friends this fall. Life is a tenuous, fragile thing. A blink and it’s over. Too many of us leave this world with regrets. I don’t want to go that route. So I’ll go see my friends while I’m able. Sure as shooting. Count on it.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 00:09:17 +0000