OW! THAT HURT!

It was April 14, 1967, and a lot went on that day in history. For one, the Boston Red Sox beat the New York Yankees 3-0. LBJ was a caricature on the cover of Time Magazine and I almost died.

It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Making a caricature of a standing President! Huh? What’s that? Why yes, I almost did.

43 years ago, as an art major at the New York Institute of Technology, I sat in the passenger front seat of a ’56 Chevy and passively watched as the drive tried to make an impression on a crossing red pick-up truck that ran a red light! It happened so fast, and I was so relaxed, that I never tensed up enough to cause anything worse than a compounded fracture of my right leg, and a lot of glass in my scalp.
There was enough glass in there to make it look like a faux diamond collection, as the doctors picked it out, one tiny piece at a time. Having just left my anatomy class, I had a large drawing pad on my lap, and I was just doodling on the cover when I looked up as the car swayed to the right and I saw the truck speed by.

To this day, I wonder why all those things were in place, that it all saved my life! If I had died, this would have been ghost written! It is bad enough I went through the windshield from the impact, and that the engine was sitting between the driver, and me and at first I thought it was sweat coming from my brow, but no, it was blood.

It took several hours (3) for the people in the emergency room to reset my ankle, and when they did… well, read that headline again.

So today, whenever the weather gets damp, whenever I stand too long on my foot, whenever I go dancing, the pain becomes excruciating, and the memories flood back like a torrent of rain, all of it funneling through that first sudden awareness of the ache.