January 25

January 25.

You look at the calendar and see that it’s not a particularly exciting day. It’s winter. There are sometimes important football games. It’s about the midway point of the academic year for most schools.

But to me, it’s an very symbolic day. It gives me an eerie feeling (I used that word in a lesson last week and the students loved it, so why not?).

And no, it’s not because it’s my five-twelfths birthday.

January 25, 2019 started out as just another day. I was driving home from my overnight job at the United States Postal Service. Yes, believe it or not, before I began my teaching abroad adventure, I worked for the federal government.

It was about 6:30 a.m. and my Ford Escape (I miss that car) and I were cruising up Interstate 87 in upstate New York. We had just passed the Twin Bridges (also known as the Thaddeus Kosciusko Bridge for you non-upstate New Yorkers) when, all of a sudden, a plank of wood flew off the back of the truck that was in the lane next to me (I was in the middle lane; the truck was in the right). The truck was one, maybe one and a half car lengths in front of me.

This was no ordinary piece of wood. We weren’t talking about a little piece that youngsters break at tae kwon do (I also miss that). This was a full-length plank, and a fairly thick one at that. Picture a balance beam at the Olympics. A better comparison escapes (pardon the pun) me at the moment.

Unfortunately, there was no time for me to make a move. The wood slammed into my right front fender. At first, I thought I had just run over the wood, and immediately after it happened, I heard an alert on my dashboard. I was expecting it to say “low tire pressure.” Instead, it said “washer fluid level low.” I had just refilled the washer fluid not too long before the accident, so that didn’t make sense to me.

Those who know me well are aware of the fact that emergency situations and I do not get along. While most people would have pulled over, I made the somewhat questionable decision to keep driving, in large part because I was in shock and didn’t really know what else to do. Looking back at it now, the car was drivable and it was a dark, cold highway, so I felt that going off to the side would have put me in real danger.

Only when I arrived home did I see the extent of the damage. The tire on my right passenger side was fine. However, that was about the only thing that was. The fender was eviscerated. The fog light was destroyed. The washer fluid reservoir was punctured, hence the dashboard warning. I would go on to be without my car for two weeks as the thousands of dollars in damage were repaired.

It had all just seemed like a stroke of bad luck until I had a conversation with my mom some time after the accident. We came to the conclusion that I had been very lucky. I had gotten away with one, as they say in the sports world. Thankfully, the slab of wood hit my car where it did.

What if it had come through the windshield?

When she first said it to me, I kind of just brushed it off. As much as I love my mother, she worries and catastrophizes (do you guys see where I get it from now?). But the reality is that she was right. I came much closer to death or serious injury than I had first imagined. If the wood had hit maybe a foot higher and a few inches further to the left, I might not be here to tell you this story.

The story has countless other what-ifs, all of which could have easily ended with me six feet under. For instance, it was winter, so matters could have been made even worse by slippery roads, but thankfully, they weren’t. To top that off, what if I had swerved to try and avoid it and wound up flipping my car or landing in a ditch? Then, there was always the possibility of me slamming on the brakes (I would have never had enough time to stop) and having someone rear end me.

All of the “what could have beens” give me chills.

So why should you care about a car accident in which no one was injured, no airbags went off, and no authorities were called?

It taught me that you can never take life for granted and that you never know when your last moment might be. I was actually pretty shaken up when I sat down and thought about everything that wasn’t far off from happening that day. Cars and fenders and washing fluid reservoirs can be replaced, but people can’t.

And then, friends, is the moral of this story.

I’m not going to call this a near-death experience, because it wasn’t that. Instead, it was more of a wake-up call. It was this accident that sent me the message that life is too short to live an ordinary life and that you need to live each day to the fullest. Shortly after that morning on the Northway (as I-87 is called by upstate New Yorkers), I made the decision that I was going to embark on my journey to the Czech Republic.

It was my time to take a risk. A different set of “what could have beens” needed to become reality. Let’s face it–your life can change (or end) in an instant, so don’t wait (if COVID hasn’t taught you this, you’re not paying close enough attention). And after all, I was 29 years old at the time, so I wasn’t getting any younger, either. If, heaven forbid, I had passed that day, I would have lived my whole life without ever going abroad and really never taking any risks at all. That’s no fun.

So I did move abroad, where I don’t have to worry about pieces of wood flying off of trucks because I don’t drive.

The rest, as they say, is history.