I was almost killed by a car yesterday.
I’m usually very careful crossing Roslyn Road, and I’ve warned many people about how dangerous it is. While I’ve lived here it has gone from a quiet country road to a heavily trafficked four lane highway. But when the pandemic came it reverted to very little traffic and perhaps, I got a bit careless. Traffic has gradually returned.
I decided to go for a walk last night later than usual, because it was so hot yesterday, about 8:30. While I walked in the quiet S section I talked to my sister on the phone, and I was still talking to her as I approached Roslyn Road to return home.
I looked both ways and saw no traffic coming. In the past we would press the button to stop traffic, but it hasn’t seemed necessary lately. As I got half-way across, I saw someone pull into the driveway of the house on my left, which is for sale. As that distracted me, along with still talking to my sister, I began to continue crossing the far side of the street.
Suddenly I heard a frantic horn and saw a speeding car about 20 feet from me. I was square between the headlights and it was headed straight for me. I immediately began to run toward the other side, but the car started veering toward me in that direction, attempting to avoid me. I don’t think he ever hit the brakes. I managed to outrun it. It was traumatizing! About 2 seconds had gone by.
Standing on the other side of the road I saw the car slow down, then speed ahead. I stood there for a while, realizing fully well that if they had not hit their horn, I wouldn’t have seen it at all, or if I couldn’t still run fast, I would simply be dead. The car was going so fast that death was more likely than injury. But even though the car was speeding, it was 100% my fault.
Back in the house, I began to try to digest this trauma. Of course, I determined that from now on I wouldn’t use the phone while crossing the street and would start using the crossing button again. The problem with that particular spot is that it is just beyond a small rise and I can’t see cars coming from my right until they are fairly close. Sometimes I can hear them coming, and ordinarily I quicken my pace as I cross the far side in case something is coming fast from my right.
But that wasn’t enough. I was still traumatized. I went outside again to look at the site of the near fatality but decided not to cross again.
I began to think about other times in the past that my life had been threatened. One obvious one was when I had a heart attack 5 years ago. But actually, I didn’t realize how close to death I had come. I had a 100% block from a blood clot in the LAD, the main artery out of the heart.
But I never took it seriously. 20 years earlier I had angioplasty so I had an idea what a heart attack might feel like. I was playing in my table tennis league and said to my opponent, “I’m going to have to default. I’m having a heart attack!” Someone else said, not believing me, “Jerry, can you play me first?” I had a young player drive me to the hospital. I somehow walked in. Then they said they didn’t have a catheter lab, so they took me by ambulance to another hospital where the doctor said he removed “The biggest blood clot I ever took out of a heart.” But I never thought I was going to die.
I thought about car accidents. Once, a drunk, speeding driver, in the exact same spot on Roslyn Road, crashed into the back of my car as I backed out of my driveway. It spun the car around 180 degrees and totaled it. I didn’t think I was going to die. I walked out of the car. But it did do some damage to my spine, and six months later the disk ruptured, causing me the greatest pain I’d ever experienced. They had to put me in a stretcher and bring me by ambulance to the hospital. But I never thought I would die.
One scarier moment was when the brakes on my car failed as I started to go down a big hill from my house in Starksboro. As I picked up more and more speed, I was worried I might crash into a tree and be seriously injured. When I would see some brush at the side of the road, I would steer through it to slow it down and I did the same at the bottom, when the car came to a gradual halt. It was totaled from underneath. But I never thought I was going to die.
I was once hit from the passenger site by another drunk driver and was in about 5 or six other crashes over many years of driving. But I never thought I was going to die.
The greatest tragedy and trauma of my life was when my younger brother Bill died on a college outing in a canoe on Lake George when he was only 20 years old. I can never forget the call I got from my father when I was in college in Ohio. It was incomprehensible that this could happen, but it did. The flight back was one long nightmare. I didn’t fly again for ten years. Every time I’ve flown since then I simply expected the plane to crash and I always have to fight that to fly. I think my father never got over it. My mother took as constructive approach as she could reaching out to any people she heard about who had suffered a tragedy.
In this covid era it’s easy to think about death. And since my heart attack I’ve followed the radical diet of Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and I’ve exercised and practiced table tennis a lot. None of that would have keep me alive if that driver hadn’t honked his horn.
I do remember one time, after my second heart procedure in in 1994, I woke up with some kind of pain in my chest. It went away, but I wrote this short poem:
And then one morning you don’t wake up.
Everyone says how surprised they are.
You would have been the most surprised,
but nothing surprises you anymore!
But my real philosophy was expressed in a long poem I wrote as part of a paper on freedom and self-determination. It is called “Freedom and the Moving I.” The concept is that there really is no constant self. It is constantly moving as time moves. So, we are continuously making our reality and definition of who we are.
And finally, there is the essay my grandfather, Bill Blatt wrote, called “Funerals are fun.”
It starts out, “You have the pleasant knowledge that this funeral is not your own. If it is, you don’t know it…..” We read it at his funeral.
But for now, I think I’m going to just press the crossing button, look both ways, not talk on the cellphone, and not cross after dark!
