Reckoning of Life

I was at the Canary Box, my friend’s house, referring to its bright yellow siding, sitting off a busy main street in Kearns, Utah. It was getting colder, the weather finally mirroring the fall season. Jason got a call from a buddy he knew, who was heading out to some club we frequented to see some disco cover band.

We headed out quite late, just he and myself in my dark green Mitsubishi Eclipse. He was always a little too tall for the car, and pushed the seat as far back as it would go, and even reclined it a bit. Back then, he had long, tightly curled hair, remnants of our rocker days, though it gradually got shorter every year. But we still wrote music together, and even tonight, he had showed me a new song he wrote. We took off from the Canary Box along Cougar Lane as the song played in my head. I started singing a melody that I thought might go along with his guitar and programmed drums he had recorded.

We turned onto 56^th South. Jason said he really liked the melody I was singing. It reminded him of Catherine Wheel, a group we listened to a lot, and I noticed, yeah, there it was in my voice – a similar rasp ness I shared with the other singer. I tried to think of where I was going with this tune, what was this song going to be about…

Then something out of the corner of my eye looked wrong.

SLAM! A sudden commotion pulled my attention to the opposite side of the street. Not fifty feet ahead of us, a car had been struck. It spun around on its wheels in the lane, and then came to a stop. It was a smaller car, a four-door economy car that had been hit by a large pickup truck. I immediately came to a stop, keeping my eyes on the car, while pulling over to the side. “You see that guy?” I said, not thinking much about what I said. The driver’s arm, already spattered with blood, was hanging limply out the car’s window. A wheel rolled passed the front of my car, and Jason and I both watched it hit the curb.

We jumped out of the car, and I reached for my phone in my pocket. As I checked for traffic and walked over to the car, I was trying to dial 911, but the keys were locked. I tried to quickly punch in the key combination to unlock them, but it wasn’t working, I was shaking too badly. Someone else ran over to the car, saying a cop at the Seven Eleven just called in the wreck. I put my phone away and looked in the car.

Next to the driver, a teenage girl was in terrible shock. “Are you all right?” I quickly asked, seeming to be an appropriate question. No, she wasn’t.

“My leg’s all retarded!”

“It’s probably broken.” She looked back at me like I was stupid or something. Of course it was broken; the entire front of the car was mangled up and in her lap. In the backseat, a younger girl, around eight years old, looked like she had broken her nose. I checked for seat belts, and they were all wearing theirs except for the driver, whose seatbelt had been severed from the impact of the truck against the driver’s side door.

“Who’s this?” I asked, referring to the driver.

“My Aunt”. I looked again at the driver, whose arm was moving slightly. Yes, I guess it was a woman. In fact, from the hair style and clothes, I’d say she was a younger woman, in her late twenties or early thirties. But I couldn’t tell by her face. I looked over at the truck. An older, very heavy, steel bumper stood at the exact height as her head. Her face at taken the full force of the collision, and it was split open on the left side, from her forehead, through her eye, to her chin. There was a lot of gory detail, though my brain didn’t analyze it at the time.

“What’s her name?”

The teenager told me, as she was ready to burst into full hysteria. I told her the most important thing she could do was to talk to her aunt, keep her thinking and here with us. The girl again looked at me like I was insane, but then calmed down and started talking.

I turned and looked over at Jason. He was by the Eclipse. Traffic had stopped all around us, slowly creeping through the middle lanes. Wide eyes stared over at the damage from inside those cars, and I had an urge to scream at them for being so insensitive. I walked over to Jason and we both shook our heads.

“Crazy, huh?”

“Yep.”

By now, the cop from the Seven Eleven had sat the young driver of the truck down on the curb, next to his tire. He had his face in his hands, on the verge of collapse. Other people were coming over to him, comforting him. I started to put the pieces together of what happened.

I went back to the mangled car. Again, the teenage girl told me her leg felt retarded and I said all we could do was wait for the paramedics to arrive, and keep talking to her aunt.

It seemed like more than an hour before the paramedics arrived, even though it was around ten minutes. A large, red truck pulled up, and young, uniformed men walked over to the wreckage. Compared to all the chaos we had just experienced, they seemed awfully slow and mechanical about their business – which was probably a good thing. They got the girls out of the car, while one man, sat behind the driver, and checked her neck for injuries. He probably checked for a pulse, too.

Jason and I waited for the cops to ask for an eye-witness. But they had plenty without us putting our two-cents in. And it would be days before I would put together exactly what happened in my head. So Jason and I climbed into my Eclipse, and drove away, to go to our party, to go on with our lives.

Jason asked me if saw the Firebird on the other side of the car. Oh yeah, vaguely remember the commotion over there. It had crashed into a fence in someone’s yard.

As Jason and I had turned onto 56^th South, the truck and its single driver, and the Firebird, loaded with kids, decided it was a good idea to see which engine could propel each vehicle over the asphalt the fastest. They probably climbed up to 70-80 miles per hour - watching each other - smiles wide.

The aunt and the kids come to a stop before pulling onto 56^th South. With minds on other things, piano lessons, homework, boys, she looks passively over to her left. She sees a truck and a car half a block away. She looks to the right, and sees an Eclipse half a block away. She pulls out slowly, maybe talking to the girls. She looks back to the left, just in time to see a heavy, steel bumper.

How quickly our lives can end – and how fast our time here has been.

With every day I wake up, I’m so thankful I get this chance to create something. For me, it’s a lot about writing, drawing and making music and movies. For others, it’s about gardening, little league baseball or a night out with friends. Whatever it is, I believe we’ve been given a gift of life; a gift of creation. Everyday we create something. And the most important choice is what we create; do we create goodness and happiness? Or do we create negativism and pain?

When my time comes, I hope I’ve done two things: Made my life worthwhile so I’m remembered as a person who brought smiles and warmth to those around me, either through my arts or my person. And secondly, help mold my child so he can also bring good to those around him, wherever he is. May he be considerate, compassionate, honest and happy.

I later learned that the aunt died, while I was standing there in the street next to her. I didn’t know her, but I hope her life was good.