Having given my parents a lot of worry when I was a teenager (sorry, Mom and Dad!), I certainly deserved to get the same from my own kids. But I lucked out. In 22 years of motherhood, I never picked up the phone to hear worse than, “I forgot my lunch.”
Recently, though, my luck ran out when I got an early morning call from our 19-year-old son, Sam, who commutes from our house to UCF every day. Being accustomed to my charmed life, I didn’t catch on right away that this was one of those phone calls.
“Don’t worry, everything is fine,” Sam said. “I just got in a little accident. Someone hit me from behind, but nobody’s hurt. Just remind me what I need to do.”
It sounded like a fender bender. I told him to call the police and that I’d call the insurance company. It didn’t seem like I was needed at the scene, but I did call Mark to let him know. He went to check it out, then called to tell me that Sam had understated things a bit, so I drove over to see for myself.
This was no fender bender. This was the kind of accident that lights up message signs on the beltway: “Serious accident at Univ/Dean.” The driver behind Sam, inattentive to a traffic slow-down, had slammed into him at full speed. It was her car I saw first; it was frightening to behold, its front end smashed up to the windshield, its innards belching steam. I spotted the car that Sam’s had been pushed into, and that one looked bad, too. I saw two crying young women, the drivers. They looked terrified.
Then, I saw Sam’s car pulled over to the side, and Sam himself, looking calm and cool, and I heard the angels sing. The car didn’t even look like it had been hit, and neither did he. All the hours we spent researching safety (at the IIHS, not the more lax NHSTA ratings) had paid off. Yes, there was some bodywork to be done. But the structural integrity of that car was ready to absorb the impact. The airbag hadn’t needed to deploy. Sam didn’t even have a sore neck afterwards!
I teach English to adult immigrants who enjoy stories, so I told them about the accident in simple words and pictures. When I looked at what I had drawn on the board to help them understand, the symbolic nature of the image jumped out at me. I had drawn a picture of the way I hope my kids go through life: unscathed in the midst of whatever wreckage there may be. Wouldn’t it be great to cultivate such inner strength and resiliency — structural integrity, if you will — that a person could absorb all of life’s blows and still greet each day with a smile that shines like a…well, like a small but tank-like white sedan, gleaming in the morning sun?
May all your phone calls bring good news this month, and may your structural integrity be there when you need it. And as always, thanks for reading Our Town — it’s more important to us than ever.