Have you ever been scared? Not movie scared but scared by incidences in your life. I have and it was some most unpleasant experiences. Mostly I got scared for my wife and children but on occasion events affecting me would scare me but usually not at the time. When the events occurred I would usually just get mad at my own stupidity. It was only later when I realized the consequences that I would let the potential outcome scare me.

For example, when I was young (and unmarried) I managed to scrape together enough money to buy a used sports car by working overtime on the graveyard shift. Apparently the very idea of my owning a sports car frightened my parents but that was a minor annoyance to someone as young as I was. Unfortunately they were more than right to be frightened. I had some incidences with that vehicle that eventually scared me too.

Being young and foolish (sigh, how many times have I used that phrase on this blog) I had the innocent belief that I was invincible particularly when it came to speed. I worked at a laboratory some distance away from where I lived and delighted in seeing how fast I could travel to work. The winding roads had only two lanes and provided a good challenge with much amusement and satisfaction when I bettered my private record. Of course you had to follow the unwritten “rules” for the challenge. Principally one had to stay in your own lane and not cross the center line.

Soon after purchasing the sports car the speedometer broke but the tachometer continued to function so I gauged my driving using the tachometer. Red line was 5000 RPM and I frequently hit the red line on straightaways. Eventually I saved enough money to fix the speedometer. Now I could finally find out how fast I’d been traveling.

Driving to work the day after the speedometer was fixed I kept a close eye on the tachometer and speedometer. As I approached 120 MPH without coming close to redlining the tachometer it suddenly occurred to me how foolish I’d been but it was not until the next morning when the realization about how stupid I’d been sunk in. That finally scared me.

Yup, I did a lot of stupid things with that car. Too many to enumerate here and they all followed the same idiotic pattern. First I’d do something stupid, then I’d get mad, and finally when I had time to reflect I scared myself. Typical was the time when I was speeding along a back road to work when I rounded a sharp 90 degree turn and there in front of me was a stalled car with another car parked beside it. I learned later that the battery had died and they were in the process of jump starting the car.

The road was completely blocked and I was flying low about to annihilate not just the cars but the people beside them as well. There was no way to stop in time and avoid a catastrophe. There was only one option available and I chose it. Jerking the steering wheel hard I drove off the side of the road, over an embankment, through a barbed wire fence, through a chain link fence guarding a high tension power tower before finally being halted by a head on collision with the power tower.

As I sat there somewhat stunned I became mad. I was mad at myself. I was mad at those idiots blocking the roadway. I was mad at the little scrape the collision caused on my thumb from the collision (Yes, that was the only damage. Hurray for seat belts!). But mostly I was mad because my beautiful sports car was a wreck and it would cost a fortune to fix.

It wasn’t until later after my future wife picked me up and spirited me home that the reality of the situation was driven home to my conscious brain. I started remembering the fact that while I sat in the center of that maelstrom just before the final collision the barbed wire fence swirled all about me before ripping my rear seat but not me to shreds (the car was a convertible). The chain link fence whipped back onto the trunk slicing it in half. And the car’s frame ended up bent and twisted beyond repair. Then I got scared but enough of those incidents. Perhaps some day I’ll write about the really scary ones like the time I almost decapitated myself and my roommate.

Scares come and go but the ones that remain with me involve my wife, my children and now my grandchildren. Sometimes they are little scares like the time our daughter broke her ankle while skating. Some times they are big scares like the time we got the phone call, “Don’t worry L.. is all right”. As I learned more about that incident I got both scared and angry. Still am for that matter.

When it comes to my family sometimes I even got scared for no good reason. I remember the time when our son was scheduled for a camping trip. The day of the trip arrived and the weather was atrocious. High winds and severe rain dampened the atmosphere. For the first and only time in my life I had what amounted to a premonition. I just could not shake the feeling that something bad would happen if I allowed my son to participate. I felt so relieved when the trip was canceled.

What goes around comes around. Now it’s my grandchildren scare me now and then. I vividly recall the time when our oldest grandson was about two years old and fell into the lake. I was in a wheelchair and felt helpless. Hurrying as fast as I could I raced to towards the dock hoping that somehow I could help when his other grandfather streaked by me, jumped into the lake, and rescued him. I’m still haunted by the incident.

Tags: family, ODD thoughts

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 12th, 2010 at 12:16 pm and is filed under family, thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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