So, that pesky cement truck story I promised you.
It was my second full year, but my first full travel season. I was into about week four or five when I started doing school visits in NH. I had scheduled a lunch with a fabulous alum in the area I was in, but had one last school visit before I met them for lunch.
This wonderful gem of a private school in the White Mountains only had about 60 students total in their upper school, and a bulletin board in the main lobby with every student’s picture on it. I had a student that I knew was attending there, and as I walked down the hallway trying to figure out where she was on the board, I failed to see the short stairwell that I promptly fell down. Fell down doesn’t quite capture what I did–I imagine it looked like when my old dog, Jackie, used to leap onto the recliner in the living room but then realized, mid-leap, that she was overshooting herself by a good foot and would then start backtracking desperately in mid-air.
“Dear Lord, the rep fell down the stairs! Call the school nurse!”
“Great,” I thought to myself. “SB rep falls down stairs, I ripped the knee out of my good pants, and I’m pretty sure my knee is the size of a softball. Rock on, GAL, rock on.” The women at the front office were very kind, helped me up, gathered my things that had spread all over the hallway, and brought me a bag of ice for my knee.
Forty minutes and a very awkward conversation with the guidance counselor later, I was parked about a block down from the restaurant I was meeting Ms BT at. I normally sit in my car when waiting for appointments, but my knee was too swollen and too sore to sit still, so I hobbled inside in my three inch heels and ordered a glass of water and a new back of ice, since the one from the high school had leaked all down what used to be my good pants. Fifteen minutes later Ms BT arrived, asked what had happened, and after I assured her things were just peachy, we began to talk about SB.
And then we heard it. That awful sickening sound of tires squealing and the crack of two (or three or four) vehicles colliding. This doesn’t happen much, apparently, in the town I was in, and everyone but me at Ms BT rushed to the windows to see. ”That didn’t sound good,” Ms BT shared. I looked at her square in the eyes and said, “just watch, with the day I’m having it’s probably mine.”
No sooner did the words leak out of my mouth, the store owner ran back in and said, “This Nissan Altima from Virginia just got totalled!” In the most innocent voice Ms BT could have mustered in that moment she said, “Do you think it might be you?”
No, everyone in this town drives an out of state car filled to the brim with pink and green pamphlets. I’m sure it’s another person. But thanks for playing today, friend!
Sure enough, Main Street looked like the cement truck had puked Peto-Bismol all over the road. The rental car, totalled. The car of the road tripping college student who had parked in front of me, totalled. The cement truck, he was ok. Long story short, he had fallen asleep at the wheel, and my car leaped in front of him just as he awoke. The best part about the whole situation? Once the townies figured out that it was MY rental car, they kept coming up and asking if I was ok, and was I hurt too badly during impact.
And as much as I wanted to tell them, “it wasn’t so bad,” I had to admit to 37 people and the entire Bethlehem Police force that I had fallen down a flight stairs up at the high school. Classy.
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I am a firm believer in that things happen for a reason. I like to think that I fell down those stairs because had I not, I would have been sitting in my car when the cement truck had hit–I arrived to the appointment 15 minutes early, and Ms BT was 3 minutes early. Cement truck? Right on time, when I would have just been getting out of the car.
I also believe I was suppose to have that encounter with Ms BT. She and I had never met–just spoke on the phone for mere minutes that August. Yet the nearest rental car facility was an hour and a half away in the same town as my Grandparents, and BT drove me there without a question. She then immediately turned around so she wouldn’t miss dinner with her husband.
In hindsight it’s an incredibly funny story, partly because it could have ended so badly so I tell it as a very funny story. But every time I see a stranger in need, I stop and think about what would have happened if BT hadn’t driven me across the state, or if the photography shop owner hadn’t taken the pictures of the wreck for me, or if the fire department hadn’t used the jaws of life to rescue my suitcase so I would have clean underwear for my visits the next day (ok, I threw that one in for fun, but it did take three of them to manually remove said luggage), or if my future husband hadn’t been transferred to the office in Madison Heights that would inevitably handle all of the follow up once I got back to VA (that’s right, I met JGL partly because of this wreck. Romantic, isn’t it?).
What if I had been sitting in that car–would I even be blogging this funny story to you right now?
Life, and life at SB is about doing and creating and achieving–but I hope we also learn to sit back once and a while and truly appreciate the things that life will undoubtedly hand us.
I know I am….
