Accidents Happen

When my children were nursery school age, I drove them to a half-day program half an hour away. I drove them to school and play-dates and birthday parties; I drove to the Bronx Zoo and the Museum of Natural History.

Despite loud music and louder conversation with them as they learned to talk, I focused too intently on how fast the traffic moved, stalled, and accelerated as everyone made up for lost time.  I tried to stay in the moment and not anticipate an inevitable sudden impact. The anger of people in the cars surrounding me heightened my fear, as did drivers whose idle swerves made me wonder if a day dream had captured them or if perhaps they were watching the world outside their windshield as if it were a movie. I lacked all faith that any driver but me would stop at the light or give the right of way.   

The car stalled at stoplights.  I hopped out and waved jumper cables until someone took pity. Occasionally that someone was a police officer checking out the bottleneck I was causing. Before long we had to admit—the car was dead. We leased a new car and I started driving over roofing nails. For a while, I contended with a flat tire once a month. Or, that’s how I remember it, which of course can’t be true. But even when we bought new radials or whatever, they popped and popped again.

As my children grew, I drove more, even though they took the bus to school. I drove them to soccer and little league practices and games, to swimming lessons at the Y, and music lessons. I drove them to the orthodontist, dance classes, play rehearsals, home from after-school gym, Cub Scouts and Brownies. Terrified of driving or not, I loved driving my children places. They often discussed their feelings more openly when strapped in the back seat. And, I loved my role as they grew up, day after day. But I never relaxed about driving. It posed too many dangers to contemplate.

The day I learned that my son’s saxophone teacher had died of a heart attack, I scraped the car’s right side against the concrete wall of a tunnel. Another time, when I picked him up from basketball, he mentioned that a boy two years ahead of him in school had died from leukemia—I backed into a restraining wall.

Sometimes when I suffered a migraine, exercise helped. If I could get out of bed at all and drive to the gym, the pain would recede after running a mile or two on the treadmill. I usually ran four, and if no one was waiting to use the machine after me, I ran five. While running and sometimes for a few hours afterward, I’d feel no pain.

One winter morning, I ran five miles on the treadmill and the headache receded. I showered and dressed, feeling better, if exhausted. The road home swooped around the reservoir. Mid-curve, I suddenly slammed forward and back. The airbag hadn’t opened, but I’d crashed through the guard rail and was stuck a few feet short of the water. Two men were racing toward me and yelling. One yanked open the door.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine. But I can’t get it into reverse.”

They helped me out. I’d collided almost head-on with a white van; my car, the front sinking into cold mud, was obviously beyond repair. As I took this in, one man reassured me. “That’s why they’re called ‘accidents.’”

The man who had driven the van didn’t ask me what happened or what was I thinking. He asked if I were okay and said he was fine. And, boy, were we lucky.

The policeman was tall and thin and so young I doubted if he were twenty-one yet. He put an arm around me. “Are you going to get in trouble?”

I looked up at him, wondering what he meant. “What?”

He copied information from my driver’s license and shrugged. “No fault accident. You won’t get a ticket.”

The tow truck driver dropped me off at home before junking the car.