driving down life's highways

I've come close to "buying the farm" on the highway more than once and I'm proud to tell you about it, mainly because I'm still here to tell you about it.

That thought occurred to me few days ago on my way to work after a truck veered from the center lane to the outside lane right in front of me, slowing down on his way to pulling off the road onto the shoulder. I've got to assume he was having mechanical problems.

I'd looked down for a second and looked up just in time to see the butt end of this truck dead ahead of me. I thought he was stopping. I hit the brake and pulled to the left, hearing my rear tires squeal, vaguely aware that there was a car in my blind spot on the left. There was no car there or I had more room than I thought, or that driver saw what was about to happen and moved left himself, and there was no collision.

I have come closer to checking out. Once, driving north on I-75 en route to Gainesville, I saw a car pulled over on the south-bound side. Looking ahead again, I saw a damned fool stopped dead on the highway in my lane to get a better look at the other car. There was a car in my blind spot and I was going too fast to stop in time so I ran off the road, shot past the moron parked on the highway, and came to a stop on the shoulder. I sat there and literally shuddered at the closeness of the call. The imbecile awakened and drove on up the road. Society should be happy I do not carry a gun in my car.

An even closer call came one evening when I was driving home from Lake Worth. State Road 70 is a good two-lane country road but they had a bridge under reconstruction and they'd built a temporary bridge next to it. I had to go left, then right, to get onto the temporary bridge. As I came around and looked ahead, I saw the headlights of one fool passing another on the bridge. I had maybe a foot of clearance on my right, and all I could do was jam on the brakes and hope - there was no time for a prayer. The driver being passed must have done the same thing, giving the lunatic room to complete his suicidal passing maneuver just barely in time.

I can think of a couple of other close calls, all of which demonstrate that (1) you can never, ever, take your eyes off of the traffic in front of you, and (2) you can believe that God does watch over fools including me and the brain-dead cretins I've met on the highway.

old family photos

I stayed home for two days earlier this week with a hacking cough [hack hack]. I was in the in-between stage that I hate: Too sick to go share my "bug" at the office, too well to go to the emergency room. Too sick to mow my lawn (you folks up North can just be jealous), too well to be comatose.

That gave me time for a project that I've put off for a rainy weekend, which is to organize family photos. I have a ton of them. The first priority is the really, really old ones but they are all important, or at least the non-blurry photos that include people we know. Blurry photos of scenic shots just don't have any lasting appeal.

My main motive is to have them where I can grab and go if we have to evacuate due to a tornado or a hurricane. On Sunday I realized I didn't know where they were. After hours of searching I discovered I did a decent job a few years back of putting many of them in ring binders with those plastic (but "archival") sheet protectors. Problem was, I'd put them in a safe place, which in this house is a great way to lose all track until you stumble across them by accident. I'm still looking for the rest of them, including two I scanned last summer and then put in a safe place.

Here's one I found, fortunately. Taken about 1915 or 1916, it shows my dad (on the right) and his brother. You'd have to love it even if you didn't know who they were.