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.