A Close Call

It had been a long day, and we were on the way home. The beltway around Charlotte was crowded as it always seems to be, and our car was on cruise control as the traffic zipped along about 70 mph. Very ordinary, almost boring, drive on a familiar, definitely boring highway.

Then, as a convoy of dump trucks sped past us, "Pow!" In the millisecond before it hit, we glimpsed the fist-sized rock coming toward us from the rear duals of one of the dump trucks, but there was neither time nor opportunity to swerve. We heard it at practically the same time that we saw it. We were helpless to avoid it.




Yet in this potentially sad story, there's a glimmer of good news: it had been a close call, for the rock didn't hit our front windshield. In that traffic on that highway at that speed it might have been a disaster. Instead, the offending rock flew over the hood, over the windshield, and smack dab into the center of the glass sunroof. Which was, praise be, closed at the time. Phew!

Fortunately the safety glass did its job and the darned thing bounced harmlessly off our sunroof and probably created some other havoc to the cars behind us. I hope it didn't do too much damage back there, but we'll never know. (Our smashed sunroof glass broke off slowly, tiny piece by tiny piece, as we continued on to home.)

There must be several morals to this story, such as "Constant Vigilance When Driving" or "Don't Follow Dump Trucks", but my favorite is, "Be Grateful For Close Calls". We've all had them, time and again, moments when we came to a fork in the road and for whatever reason took one path instead of the other and then realized, perhaps years later, what a close call it had been.

Looking back, it was a close call when that little school in West Virginia didn't accept me, or when I broke up with a college girl friend, or when I didn't pursue that parish in Virginia, all times when I said, "Phew, that was close." Sometimes, of course, these close calls work the other way, with consequences not as happy. As in presidential elections and baseball playoffs, for instance, when we're reminded that close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. But the ones I remember best are those with happy endings.

Whether it's fate or divine guidance or the good fairy, we've all had those moments when we mop our brow and say, as I did on that Interstate around Charlotte, "Phew, that was a close call."