I’m guessing that if you have to look Death in the face at the age of six or seven, your life doesn’t exactly flash before your eyes. You might be aware that you’re in some kind of trouble, and that you got yourself into it, and boy are you going to get a whuppin’ when you get home, but you’re not going to think about what a good life you’ve had so far and thank God for it or anything. In fact, if you’re lucky enough to live through the experience unscathed you’ll forget all about it until 38 years later when you are stuffing a pile of french fries down your gullet at The Cheesecake Factory and somebody says a word that sparks an inkling that leads to a memory and the next thing you know, you’re blogging about it.
When I was five years old, my father left the family business (an auto body repair and paint shop) to open a business of his own. He leased out office space and a yard from his father in the same building as the body shop and started his own towing service. So, while the apple fell, it did not fall far.
It was a 24-hour service, so the business phone line in our house would frequently ring in the middle of the night. It was an unusual dinner when the phone didn’t ring sending my father out the door abandoning his half-eaten dinner.
If my mother was out after our bedtimes and a towing call came in, my father would have to drag my younger sister and I out of bed and take us with him. Crabby as hell, we’d fight over what little space there was on the stiff, vinyl bench seat of the truck to reclaim our slumber.
One night, my father pulled over on the freeway behind the car in trouble and set the brake since we were parked on an upward slope. The brake was a lever switch thingy among the radios and other crazy cockpit-like controls on the dashboard. It was a small version of what Dr. Frankenstein flipped before proclaiming “He’s alive! He’s alive!”
My sister slept beside me while I was dicking around with the steering wheel pretending to drive when my foot must have dislodged the mini-Frankenstein switch. The tow truck started to roll backwards on the shoulder of the freeway and began curving toward the traffic lanes. My father was up the hill talking to some guy about the car. As I recall, the rest of this scene happened in slow motion.
I stuck my head out the window and screamed for my dad until he turned around. I’m not sure if I made any sort of obvious announcement of the current predicament, but he managed to size up the situation and ran toward us. I don’t think I ever saw my father run before and I don’t recall ever seeing him run since, so I don’t know how speedy he was, but I can safely say I’d never seen him run that fast in all my life.
I feebly tried to steer the truck back toward the shoulder while my father caught up to the truck, jumped in and slammed on the brakes. I don’t know who saved our lives, him or me, but I know who endangered them: him. What was he thinking, leaving his two young defenseless daughters so precariously perched on a hill, completely failing to threaten us with “Don’t touch anything!” before stepping out? We could have been smashed to smithereens!
I suppose I deserved a spanking from the omnipresent wooden spoon kept on the top of the piano, but maybe my father was too relieved that our lives were spared for it to occur to him to punish me. That, and the fact I played dumb as to what could have caused it. Come to think of it, I didn’t kick the brake lever that far out of position and when I tried to push it back where it belonged, it seemed to already be set as far as it would go.
So, while he was busy not telling my mother how close he came to killing the children, I was busy not telling him that the whole thing could have been my fault. Looks like this apple didn’t fall that far either.
