CRASH OF '71 (continued)

As you saw, the Ghia did not recover; but Dad did. In a few weeks, he was back to his old ways…with one exception: no more little sports cars. As a replacement for the Ghia, he bought a 1970 Lincoln Continental. It was a tank. Anybody attempting to collide with that behemoth would be looking down the mean barrel of some DEEtroit heavy metal.

I, however, was not back to normal. I was left with a bit of a limp. For months after the accident, I hobbled around with pain in my knee and hip.



Nobody was quite sure what to do with me, until a fine man named Jess Gwinn sponsored me as a candidate for treatment at Shriner’s Hospital for Crippled Children in St. Louis.

It was at Shriner’s that I was diagnosed with Perthes and put in a plaster cast to position and immoblize my hip, so it would begin to recalcify and form a healthy new hip bone. The doctors said I would have had the condition anyway. The accident brought it to our attention more quickly, and probably made it worse.


 

 

Hot Rod Lincoln 


Oh, Yeah 

I wore the cast for more than two years, traveling to St. Louis for checkups and a new cast every couple of months. It was there, at Shriner’s, where I learned to do tricks in a wheelchair. I met all kinds of deformed and injured children. I felt pretty lucky most of the time. In one of the more bizarre moments at the hospital, Tiny Tim sang “Tiptoe Thru the Tulips” at my bedside.

I walked on crutches for a few months after losing the cast. Fell down the stairs and broke my arm during that period; but that’s another story!

The hip healed. Sorta. I wasn’t Pinocchio; I could walk and run like a real boy. But too much strain on the hip, or a drastic weather change might cause a hitch in my get-along. I was able to play sports, and I developed my own peculiar strut. Kind of like John Travolta with an occasional cob up his ass.

Today, I still have some pain and discomfort. Sometime in the next few years I will have to have a total hip replacement.

What about the stranger?

I turned 40 this year, and I went in search of my narratives. Perhaps it’s my age, but I have come to realize that we are little more than the collection of our stories. So, I asked my parents to tell me about the accident.

It turns out that some of my relatives knew the stranger’s name. We had fallen out of touch with him, but maybe they would know how to reach him. I'm not sure why I wanted to know. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do. I guess I felt like I should go speak to him, thank him for his faith. I suppose part of me wondered if he was real. I have heard lots of stories of people who were rescued or helped in some way, only to find that their savior had mysteriously disappeared.

Jacob wrestled with God, or an angel, and won. At the end of the fight, God renamed him “Israel” and messed with his hip. Gave him a limp. Was this stranger my angel? My god? Was there some message I had missed? What had I become? Who was I supposed to be? Had I wrestled well, or was God still waiting for me to prove myself? I needed to find some kind of answer.

Sometime in 1973, the stranger wrapped his lips around a Smith & Wesson.

I still never found out his name, but my uncle claims to remember the story of the suicide. No one really knows why he did it. Maybe his wife got tired of him living for others and not for himself. Maybe there was no one left to save. Maybe the cumulative weight of all that ferocious love became more than his heart could bear. I don’t know the story. I just know that when I heard it, I wept. I wept for the man I never knew. I wept for the crazy son of a bitch that would pick a strange kid out of a ditch and race for help...to hell with what anyone thought about it.

Do angels kill themselves? I don’t know. Maybe angels don’t just perform beautiful miracles. Maybe they live for awhile and fall hard so we can learn how to live. I know that the stranger’s life has made me learn to not take my rescue lightly. I don’t want to live a life marked by fear or guilt. I want to live a life of gratitude. Ever aware of grace. Whether it be a kid in a ditch, the oppressed outcast, or some poor guy who’s reached the end of his rope. I don’t want to retreat to safety. I want to live with strange passion. I want to pick them up.

I better get a station wagon.

CRASH OF '71

I tried to go for a run the other day. We had been experiencing strange weather: cold one day, warm the next...rain, sun, etc. Limping, I returned to the house after just a few blocks. Weather changes do a number on my hip. I suffer from the effects of avascular necrosis of the femoral head, brought on by a childhood case of Legg-Calve-Perthes disease, where the blood supply to the ball joint of the hip is cut off. The hip starts to die, and eventually collapses.

It is particularly acute if you suffer some sort of trauma to the hip.


My dad scandalized some of the church folks when he bought a convertible. It was a sweet ride: a bright red Volkswagen Karmen Ghia. But not everyone at the First Baptist Church of Sedalia, Missouri was ready for their pastor to be tooling around town in a ragtop. I mean, it was 1971, and the culture was being destablized enough by ungrateful little punks like John Kerry questioning the wisdom of war in Southeast Asia, and hippies like John Lennon telling us to imagine no religion. The last thing we needed was to see our preacher in a little German car with the wind in his sideburns.

Well, the public indignity was short-lived.

A few months after he bought the Ghia, Dad and I drove down to Thayer, on the Missouri-Akransas border, to see my grandparents. We had a nice visit, and on the way home we took highway 63 from West Plains to Willow Springs. The top was down and the wind was a sedative. I unbuckled and fell asleep leaning against my dad.

When we came to the dogleg turn near Pomona, an approaching car crossed the centerline and headed right for us. There was no escape on the right; the truckstop entrance offered a blunt abutment. Dad tried to swerve to the left to avoid a head-on collision. No good. The oncoming driver corrected at the same time. We met in the middle, with the other car catching the right front of the convertible, peeling my side of the car like a tin can. If I had been sitting upright, I would have taken the force of the impact.



The paramedics said if Dad hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt, he would have been thrown 50 feet out of the car and killed. But, since seatbelts in 1971 only covered the lap, the same restraint almost cut him in two. When the ambulance arrived, they saw he was in a life-threatening condition and loaded him up for transport. Either they didn’t see me crumpled up under the dashboard, or there wasn’t room for both of us in the ambulance...or maybe they thought my injuries were superficial and that I should just shake it off and walk to the hospital; but for some strange reason, they took off without me. That’s right. Six years old and they left me in the ditch.

Enter the stranger. He was driving a big Plymouth station wagon, and he didn’t like the looks of that situation one bit. Without training, permission, or hesitation, he grabbed my semi-conscious body, stuck me in the back of his wagon, and took off for Ozarks Medical Center.

The stranger was apparently accustomed to lending a hand. The car was mostly full of day-laborers. Nobody wanted them fulltime, so he hired them when he could. And they were black. And it was Southern Missouri in 1971. My world was pretty white.

When I woke up in a strange car, with four strange black men staring down at me, and fire shooting through my legs, I screamed like a motherfucker.

I’m sure we made quite a sight: a 1965 Plymouth Valiant Wagon barrelling down the road toward West Plains — breaking the law, carrying outcasts, and crying out for deliverance. I can just hear the stranger, hunched over the wheel of his renegade ambulance, muttering, “The last shall be first. The last shall be first.” Giving the finger to all the doctors, the bigots, and the careful standersby that would rather watch from safety than dive elbowdeep into the shit. He was a man of faith.

His faith delivered me to the hospital, where I stayed for a week or two.

After our odd separation at the scene of the accident, Dad demanded that we share a room. At first the nurses weren’t going to allow it, until he took a break from spitting up blood and threatened to kick somebody’s ass with a bedpan.

The stranger came to visit once. We thanked him, but over time we were preoccupied with our own recovery and forgot his name. His faith gave way to our reality, as faith so often does.

Although I never saw him again, he recently reentered my life.

(Stay tuned for Chapter 2)

THE SPACE BETWEEN

Thanks to those of you that contributed to the latest dialogue. It has been an intense week or so. She went home last weekend. She's doing well. She left the hospital with a steel plate in her jaw and a halo brace holding her fractured neck together. What a tough young woman. I pray that she is able to deal with her emotional wounds as well as she has dealt with her physical condition.

Some of you raised some meaningful and provocative questions. Sorry I didn't engage all of them with my typical vigor and verve. The last few days have been filled with final exam prep and an enormous load of papers to grade. I am always a little stricken with malaise at the end of the spring semester. Don't know why. Perhaps it's the stress. Perhaps it's a little like post-partum depression: separating from something you have nurtured for months. We don't finish finals until the end of this week; then I get to sit through a commencement speech by Majority Whip Roy Blunt.

Huh. Whip Roy Blunt.

Whip Roy Blount.

Me like the sound of that.

I have been escaping paper-grading by watching an occasional film. The first escape was My Dinner With Andre. If you haven't seen this 110-minute film about a dinner conversation, you must. Do it now. I'll wait.

Wasn't it great? Can you imagine having another "So, how was your day?" kind of conversation after that?

If you weren't delighted by the dialogue, at least you had to love the fact that Wallace Shawn actually says "inconceivable" like his Vizzini character in Princess Bride.

The next was a revisitation of Amadeus, the film about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, that is really about Antonio Salieri: "the patron saint of mediocrity." He's my saint these days.

Speaking of saints, yesterday it was Luther that spoke to my internal and ongoing catholic-protestant struggle. As Protestant-like Catholic author Walker Percy wrote, "One dead, the other powerless to be born."

Was that random enough for you? Back to grading. Oh, hell, everybody gets an A.

HUG YOUR DAUGHTERS

I just came from the hospital, where I was at the bedside of an incredible young woman. Beautiful. Smart. Funny. She represents everything that gives me hope for the future. Whether she is speaking out against injustice, performing, or making a smartass comment to one of her annoying professors, she is doing it with style and grace.

Early yesterday evening she was viciously assaulted. She was running on a recently completed biking trail on a warm sunny day in a small Midwestern town: a town that was recently named one of the safest in America. She suffered numerous broken bones, cuts, and bruises, not to mention the kind of physical and emotional injuries I cannot begin to understand.

After spending hours with her and her family last night and today, I have this to say: Men, hug your daughters.

Women, you should hug your daughters too. And all of you should hug your sons as well. And, if you don't have children, hug someone else's kids so they know they are loved.

But most of all, men, hug your daughters. Hug them until they start to wonder why you're still hugging them--until it starts to embarrass them--then hug them some more.

Also, men, if you ever have the urge to say something, do something, or look at something that treats women as anything other than the apple of some daddy's eye...Stop it.

Just stop it.