Once in a while seeming innocent thoughts invade one’s mind. At the time, they do not appear to have any relevancy beyond the initial reflection. This time was different.
In early 1996, I was in a car with both my roommate and older sister. We had just returned from church and were taking my sister home.
After I let her out of my passenger side door, it struck me that I had not given her my usual hug. So, I got out of the car and told her I missed my hug. My sister happily complied and we did our “pat-pat”, “love you”, “hugs and kisses” thing.
Exiting that embrace, I returned to the car and got. in. We backed out of the apartment parking lot and proceeded down the alley – business as usual.
Thinking nothing was out of the ordinary, we came to the end of the alley and inched up to the parkway thoroughfare. As we stopped to check traffic, I happened to notice a car swerving down a steep street. My left-side peripheral vision noted this and watched as this seeming out-of-control car was side swiping parked cars to its right.
We simultaneously crept our way into the street and I cautioned my roommate to go a different route. I told her I didn’t feel we should go the normal way up the incline. While we were deliberating that decision, the car in question had spun down the hill and crossed the median, finally plowing into the front yard of a house, striking a garbage can, tree, and garage port.
Still frightened that the rust-colored, two-door weapon could strike us in an erratic change of course, we waited to see which route it would take to leave the area. We sought to gain eye contact with the persons in the car in an effort to perceive their decision, since it did not seem likely that this crash was the end of their movement.
Correct in our estimation, the car backed up and sped off, going through the alley parallel to the direction we were facing. In what seemed to take forever, we slowly advanced into the street and drove parallel with the crash dummies. We tried to get into the mode of a tornado warning – in a car, drive away from the funnel. Thinking that was an appropriate illustration, we did just that. We went up to the next block, turned right – always looking for this speeding bullet. Seeing nothing. we went home.
In reflection of those brief moments, we realized the lapse of the time it took to stop for the hug was the exact time it would have taken us to go up that incline and become a target of this car, for we would have been in direct contact for its fury.
That day, a hug literally saved our lives. Ever since that experience, I have pondered how many emotional crashes could have been avoided if a hug was snuck into that situation.
In more ways than one, a hug can save your life.