For Beth....

Beth tagged me for her own made up meme fun. I am to name any time I have had a close call with death....was knocking on heaven's door if you will. Here is what I came up with:


In 1989 I was, let's see, a junior in college....it all runs together. Anyway, I decided to head home one Friday on a whim (no home game that weekend) and set out on that windy WV road when I reached down to turn up the volume on Alice Cooper's Poison and lost control on a wet curve while driving too fast (I was in a hurry to see my boyfriend mother). My car started spinning round and round....round and round like a record baby and I was all over the road. There was no way I could control that Corolla and I just took my hands off the wheel and watched from that point. It seemed like it took forever in that eerie slow motion way it took on, but I am sure it was only seconds. I eventually slammed head on into the mountain on the right hand side of the road and my car came to a rest in a huge ditch. I remember sitting there after it was over trying to turn the engine on so I could just head on home and maybe my dad wouldn't notice when a nice old man came and fetched me from the vehicle. He took me into his beautiful home, kicked the neighbors off the party line, and called my dad. His wife sat and held pink washcloths on the back of my head and kept telling me that, no, I wasn't bleeding, she just thought I had a little knot back there, but I would catch glimpses of her husband tossing those rags in the garbage every few minutes. All kinds of people I knew from my hometown on their own trips home kept stopping in to check on me after seeing my car smashed to smithereens on the pavement. That nice lady fixed them all cokes and gave them chips and cookies while we all waited there for my dad. I didn't realize at the time what all the fuss was about. I still thought I could get my car home because it was really just a little fender bender. It wasn't until the next week when we went to the salvage yard to retrieve some things from the car that I saw just how bad it was. The roof had collapsed (probably what cut my head, they still aren't sure), the car was accordioned until I really didn't have a trunk or much of a back seat, and the passenger side was pretty much blown away. I guess it's a good thing my roommate hooked up that Thursday night and decided to stay behind with her fifth man of her dreams of the semester because she most certainly would have been killed since she always refused to wear a seat belt. So maybe this is really her brush with death story, but the cops told my dad I would likely have been ejected into that mountain and killed if I hadn't been using mine. I have never been in a car without one since.



Lesson learned here.......keep your eighties tunes cranked at all times so you never have to risk your life to adjust the volume.