Jan 4, 2007

It's easy to remember when it happened.

It was 9:00pm on the dot.
It was Jan 4, 2006.
It was time for the kickoff.

It's easy to remember because it was the night of the biggest college football game of the year - and perhaps one of the most exciting - the Rose Bowl, pitting USC against Texas.

I wouldn't know how exciting it was - the final score tells me it was 41-38 Texas.
(I actually just went and found it on the web and watched highlights - yeah, that was one exciting game alright. It was on ESPN classic the other night as well. I have not wanted to revisit that night in any way shape or form and so all details had eluded me until now. Esp. ironic is that my whole family was born in Texas and it would have been fun to watch it with my pops)


Hwy 41 northbound at Braman in Ft Myers, FL. Monika and I were heading back to my Dad's from the beach after a great last day of hanging down there - we'd come down New Year's Day.

We were going to head home to NY the next afternoon. But there were other plans...


That was almost it. Pack up the tents, move along folks. There's nothing left to see here...

But seatbelts and airbags do work - given the right circumstances - and we were lucky to have those.

I saw her pull out from the stop sign, saw the whole thing in slow motion - I guess about 60 ft in front of us - heading across our path from right to left. She was pulling out from a side street to head south and I guess just did not see us (she reeked of booze apparently - 49 year old woman according to the police report). I veered slightly left in the split second I had to react, so as not to tattoo her door and most likely kill whoever was driving in the process.

That LaBaron convertible we were driving was a like little tank I must say, and it sent her car spinning and wound up a good distance away down the street to the right - not into oncoming traffic, thankfully (it is a 7 lane road).

And as for us, we we're stopped cold, a smoldering wreck, airbags deployed, wrinkled hood, cracked windshield, broken driver side window, glass everywhere, impact absorbed by our bodies, steaming radiator fluid flowing away and then that eery silence and stillness that seemed to settle in as everything turned toward our catastrophe. The traffic, the passersby - in that one area the impact of the collision had gaveled all things to a temporary but complete stop.

A moment in time.

And then disbelief registers. You just think, "no". That did not just happen.

How could this have happened in literally the blink of an eye?

Next.