A most unusual thing happened to me today. I'm not even sure why I'm posting this here, since this is a humorous site, and the subject I'm posting about is dead serious. This really happened to me today.

I almost died.

There's a cliche I've heard a lot, "...came within an inch of his life", but for me, it was more like a foot. (At least, one foot is all that I'm sure of.)

This is what happened: I was driving down the road from my work today, when I went through one of those dangerous intersections that makes you wonder if the city planners were on LSD when they designed it. (In other words, it was your typical Connecticut intersection.) This particular 3-way intersection has two nearly parallel roads that merge together at an acute angle, separated by a rock wall to obstruct your vision, just before hitting another intersection with a stoplight that is on the top of a hill. When most people approach the intersection from the main road, they don't use their blinkers since they just follow the main road (you barely have to turn at all to go either left or right.) No matter which way you decide, you still think you're on the main road. These roads are one-lane-in-each-direction roads, and people parallel park on both sides.

So, this was the intersection that I was approaching, going towards the main road with the light. I saw that there was one of those scary trucks with a big yellow snowplow mounted to the front that was going (in the opposite direction) to go down one of the roads, but without his blinkers on, I couldn't tell which one. Now, for me to get into my lane, I had to cross his. I had plenty of time. When I first started crossing, I didn't think there'd be any problem because he was still out at the hill. Unfortuantely, I realized that was going much faster than I thought he was. At that point, if I stopped in the midddle of the intersection, I would have been hit. So, having no other choice, I floored it and tried to get to the other side before we collided. I think that he wasn't paying much attention, because he didn't slow down.

At one point, I looked down through my side window at the snowplow. That image is burned into my memory with startling detail, because that was the point where I realized that I was going to die. A truck weighing several thousand pounds, with a big snowplow wider than the truck itself mounted in front, was less than a foot from my car door, and it was so close that I couldn't even see the front of the plow. All I could see was down at it, and the space between the plow and the truck. It was too late for the truck to turn, and it _still_ hadn't slowed down.

Four very weird thoughts entered my head simultaneously. If it wasn't for these thoughts, I'm pretty certain I wouldn't mention this in the Rink forum. I've never thought more than one thought at a time (and even that's a challenge, sometimes :-), but these were my thoughts:

* I'm definitely going to die.
* If the angel between our vehicles stops the truck, I might live.
* This car is going to be totaled, crumpled flat.
* (in the back of my mind: I wonder how I'm going to phrase this incident when I post about it in Rinkworks.)


I looked ahead at the road in front of me, and waited for the crash. It didn't happen. In my rear-view mirror, it looked like the truck was slamming into my side. Then, after it was beyond way-too-late, I heard the guy slam on his brakes... behind me. I was already safe in the other lane. As I looked for a place to pull off, I saw that Mr. Plow was still slamming on the brakes, stopping, and getting out of the truck. I found a spot, parked, but by then the truck had taken off and was gone. The smell of burned tire rubber hung heavily in the air.

So for minutes, I sat there, and thought about it, and tried to control the shaking that was wracking my body. I went over the events in my mind, over and over again, looking for a logical way out. It came down to this: I was born and raised in the south, and thus (having moved to New England), I've never seen a snowplow up close before. The only ones I've ever seen have been from a distance, and now all of a sudden I have a memory of what a snowplow looks like when it's about one foot from your driver's side door and closing. I'm sure that I was really phazed at the time, and I might have been in mild shock afterward, but I have never seen a snowplow that close before in my life (so it wasn't something my mind extrapolated or pulled out of memory). By all rights, I should have been dead. I also know that I didn't hear the squealing tires until the truck was behind me, so something happened that I didn't see. The memories I have of one-second-before and one-second-after I should have been hit seem contradictory in my memory.

Another point that bothered me was my thought about "the angel". I never saw an angel. I wasn't thinking about angels before the incident. But while it was happening, I was wondering if the angel was going to be able to stop the truck or not.

And finally, why, in this last moment of my life, where everything was supposed to be flashing before my eyes, ...why was I wondering what I'd be writing what I'm writing right now? (no offence intended to Sam or the RinkWorkers or anybody else.)
Oddly enough, this might be the only one of these mysteries that I can explain. Today, I had been busy for the first time since I was assigned this job, and hadn't had time to check out the Rinkworks forum. Probably, I was reminding myself to check out the forum when I got home, and so it was near the top of my mind just before this all happened.

But the other mysteries remain. I've been having flashbacks all day long, of that plow about to plow into my side, and I shake a little with the memory.

But perhaps it was worth it. As I sat in my car, waiting a couple of minutes for my nerves to settle down, I took a good, hard look at my life. I saw a lot of areas where I should be doing one thing and was procrastinating instead. There's friendships I haven't been maintaining, the room I haven't been cleaning, and all the other so-called "little things" in my life that I've been waiting to do until later... It was weird, the clarity that I saw my own life with. It was also humbling.

Since it seems that I've got some time left on this rocky ball after all, perhaps now it's time I started using it wisely.


Enigma