Every time you step out that door some sonofabitch is shootin at ya. That’s what my grandfather always said. He wasn’t paranoid; he was a state policeman in Hazleton, PA.
It’s not a negative worldview, though it may seem that way; it’s realistic, and it doesn’t mean you don’t go out there, but when you do, know the reality. He played poker at Cippys, the garage on 15th St., with members of the mob, where he’d played his whole life. And when he went out to eat, he always sat with his back to the wall.
He didn’t think the world was a bad and violent place. He died 30 years ago, after a lifetime on the squad, and he’d seen a lot of things. What he meant was that no matter what you do, there’s probably someone who doesn’t like it, and may have it in for you. It didn’t mean you were under constant threat, that you should question everyone’s intentions. It did mean however, you should keep your eyes open.
My mother walks through the world like her father; albeit, unarmed, but with an eye for danger. The slightly sketchy guy walking a little too close, an overly friendly sales rep, the odd, stray comment from someone you just met. My mother can see straight through your bullshit like a window. I know when she thinks someone’s on the make because she refers to him as that “fella” (“Listen, fella,” or “I don’t trust that fella”). You earn that moniker, you’re no good.
She taught me how to drive-to be, in her words, a defensive driver. In other words, you you had to assume other people weren’t paying attention, or that they’d grab for whatever they could get, including speed through a yellow light at the last possible second, or hook an aggressive left turn and scare you half to death. She didn’t want me to just be a driver but a defensive driver, with a heightened awareness of not just what was going on but what could go on. Even when you were just backing out of your own driveway. To be honest, I’m grateful for what my mother taught me, if she hadn’t taught me to be defensive then I don’t know how my driving would have turned out. If anything, all I can say is that people need to learn how to drive defensibly. Even taking a course can be a huge help (you can visit website here for more information on it). Trust me, you won’t regret it.
My grandfather taught my mother how to drive in the snow. When she was 16, they took the Buick to an empty parking lot during a snowstorm, at the protesting of her mother, and he told her to gun it hard and slam on the brakes. He wanted her to feel what the car does, how it responds, how it skitters and slides over the ice. He didn’t want her to be taken by surprise, or panic or lose control of the vehicle; when she knew what it was going to do, she could lean into it and steer.
Driving at the best of times in normal conditions can be dangerous enough as it is, without adding snow and ice to the ground as well. I think this is one of the most important things you can be taught when learning to drive, as I’m sure we’ll all be required to drive in these conditions at some point in our lives. Even knowing how to avoid crashes in these situations could help to save a life. One of our friends recently had to contact someone similar to this car accident lawyer in Cartersville, GA, because she had been involved in a collision due to a driver losing control of his car. And that was in normal conditions. I’m just glad that my mom has had some experience in driving in the snow.
The day after Christmas, I was in the back seat of my mom’s Subaru; she was driving, my dad was in the passenger seat. We were on our way to the movies, cruising along Rt. 290 West in Marlborough, MA.
“Why do you put your turn signal on two miles before the exit,” my dad asked her, teasingly. She ignored him.
And seconds later, a box truck slammed into the left rear corner of the Subaru, precisely where I was sitting. I didn’t see it coming. A visceral hit quaked through me; I stopped breathing and time stretched out in one long, protracted moment of sheer terror.
My mother kept her eyes on the road, working hard to steady the car. We arced left, then right.I braced for a second hit that didn’t come. She pulled the car at last to a stop beside the off ramp.
The smell of searing metal, the grit of broken glass in the air. What just happened what just happened. The choreography of a car wreck assumed its next steps–a helpful stranger pulled over to see if we were ok, handed us water bottles and called the police. They mentioned that once we feel better and less shaken up, we should seek advice from compensation lawyers to see if we can get some help buying a new car. The driver of the box truck, to his credit, came right over to our window and told us of course this was all his fault. “I didn’t see you. I looked away for a moment and there you were.”
My parents were absurdly calm, but I was shaken, literally shaken up, like a cocktail, heady with the shock. It was as if my soul had come this close to slipping right out of me, had come fizzing to the surface in a kind of effervescent panic. I stepped out to take a look and saw the chewed up back end of the car, as if some gigantic beast had reached down and taken a bite out of it. I burst into tears. She put her arms around me and intoned like a prayer, We’re ok, we’re ok, we’re ok.
And in truth, we were. We had not a scratch on us. Nothing, aside from a mild headache and the uneasy sense of having gotten too close to the edge of something. The next day we took Advil and napped. It was in fact the first and only accident my mother had ever been in. The whole time, she says, she could swear she could hear her father in her head, as if he had been holding the wheel. Steady, steady. That sonofabitch.