The rooftop lights

I keep a list of blog ideas.  Many from my past ... fun, full of fancy.  Some more serious.

This one is serious.  It’s not often that drama – serious drama – invades your life.  But on this day, it did.  And we were both so young.

I was walking home from Avery, our grade school.  I remember it now in some detail: I had just crossed Newport Avenue and was climbing up the small hill called Park Road.  I was carrying my trombone case;  I was in sixth grade.

Ahead of me, at the top of the hill, was a police car.  Its rooftop lights were on.

At first I thought, “cool.”  I’ve always been one of those gawkers intrigued by police and fire-engine lights. Then, as I passed, I looked in the car.  I looked twice. My little sister, Barb, just 7 years old, was in the back seat. She’d been crying.

It was one of those moments when the clichés are so true: The world spins, your stomach sinks, everything normal suddenly seems out of kilter. Barb, in a police car, crying?

What happened?

Unsure of what was going on, I asked the cop that question.

“She’s my sister,” I added.

“She was hit by a car,” he said … while she was crossing Newport.

“Hit by a car?!”  I thought. My limbs got shaky.

Barb, then in first grade, always left school earlier than me. She was on a different schedule. That was back when pretty much everyone walked to and from school.

Now that I knew what happened, I needed to sit next to her, to be with her. It was automatic. I didn’t know much about comforting others then, but I knew my place was in the back seat, next to my sister. 

I climbed in, and Barb recalls that I stretched the trombone case across our two laps. (There was no place else to put it.)

She and I looked at each other. Then we cried, she from seeing the familiar face of her brother, I think; I from seeing my sister, hurt.

The fact was, she was scared. And I was, too.

I also remember the officer telling us that he’d tracked down Dad, and that Dad was rushing there from his office. 

The other surprise: Doug Kellerman, a close friend of Dad’s who lived a few houses up on Newport, was also in the car, in the backseat.  Doug, an aerospace engineer, was fighting leukemia and so staying at home. Dad must have called Doug to help after he got the news.

I remember that Doug and the officer worried about Dad’s driving: “I hope he gets here without a problem,” one of them said. “It’s hard to drive when this kind of thing happens.”

But soon Dad arrived fine – in the white Pontiac Tempest that he had inherited from my grandparents.

He jumped out of the car.  He was worried. You could see it in his face. He quickly gathered up Barb and said he’d take her to the emergency room, just to make sure everything was okay.  I was told to head home to the house, just a few blocks away.

           

And I did.  I was upset, sure, worried about Barb, but comforted that Dad was there.

In the end Barb would be fine, though the ER visit apparently wasn’t fun: “I remember sitting in the ER with one of those tiny kidney shaped vomit trays and hoping I wouldn’t have to use it,” Barb recalls now.

Barb, of course, was lucky. And eventually, all settled down at home.  Mom, who must have been doing errands when all of this occurred – no cell phones! – reassured us that everything would be okay.  Imagine her pain of not being at home!

But now I wonder about the driver who hit Barb.  And what became of him.  And what he remembers … including possible regrets.

It’s also interesting how we sometimes store memories under trap doors. And it takes something like a blog to bring them back into the sunlight.

This isn’t a fond memory. But its lessons were important … about sibling love, near misses and the fragile nature of things. Plus, anytime you can avoid those rooftop lights, it’s a good thing.

Yes, Barb was lucky that day. But I was lucky, too, because she was.

And that’s the point: When luck blesses one of us in a family, it blesses us all.