My rant from the other day ran as a guest column in my wife's paper this morning. The public relations director of the local college e-mailed my wife to say:
Damn, he should be a weekly writer for the paper. He got his column - our collective sentiments - exactly right.
For the last three days I've tried to put into words - in a journal, in a diary, in anything - my feelings on the subject and I've been unable to muster a cogent thought. He did it for me. So I'll clip his column and paste it in my journal at home, and be glad he took the time to put pen to paper, fingers to keys, to publish in public what so many of us think and feel.
Tell him I said "thanks."
I just got home from a wildly divergent pair of errands. I went to a quilt shop to get my wife some fabric, batting and thread she desperately needs to finish a baby quilt in time for my daughter-in-law's shower on Sunday afternoon.
And I bought 500 rounds of .45 ACP ammunition and a spare magazine for a defensive pistol class I'm taking this weekend. The local sheriff's department is putting it on. My wife took it last fall while I was motorcycling in Colorado and insists that I take it too. I'm cool with that. I'm one of those guys who believes the best definition of "gun control" is being able to hit what you're aiming at.
Insert sharp intake of breath here.
Yes, small wonder that I'm against the efforts of the Clintons and other misguided people to render us personally defenseless. I won't take the time to explain or defend my position. Just go to the National Rifle Association website and read their arguments and you'll know how I feel. I practically never go out packing a gun, but I have the proper permit and I enjoy having the option of not being a sheep.
The wife and I are making plans to load our Nikon D100s and various lenses and other equipment into our new all-wheel-drive Subaru Forester and head for the Colorado Rockies in a week or so on a much-needed vacation and photo safari.
We have friends - retired postal workers who got out before they went postal and who live at 10,500 feet near Breckenridge. They're out traveling until June 1, but have offered us the use of their home. We'll feed their birds and squirrels, photograph the fox who visits their deck daily and listen to the wind whisper in the pines.
I never in a zillion years expected to own an SUV, but it's amazing how quickly things can change. My wife was driving down the street on Wednesday, March 31, when the driver of an oncoming car tried to make a left turn in front of her at an intersection. Both cars entered the intersection under the green light and my wife said she had absolutely no time to react. All she saw was a big white car, the hood of her blue car coming up and the airbag that nearly broke her nose, blacked her eyes and gave her a mild concussion. She had her cell phone with her and called to ask me to meet her at the ER. While I was waiting for the ambulance, I met a woman who said she just got word her mother-in-law had been in an accident and was being transported to the hospital.
Oh?
She went on to tell me that her mother-in-law has macular degeneration (a kind of hardening of the arteries of the retina that destroys your vision from the center out). "We've tried to make her stop driving, but she insists she can see well enough to drive," she told me.
Yes, this was the woman who hit my wife. Torpedoed by a blind woman.
We settled with our own insurance company on the car damage - my late mother's '92 Buick LeSabre was a write-off - but we have two years to settle on the medical stuff and we're in no big hurry.
Since the accident, my wife has experienced headaches, dizziness, disorientation, loss of short-term memory and, most recently, a painful tightness in the throat that her doctor says is clearly stress-related.
We were mildly surprised to get mail from two different personal injury attorneys within a week of the crash. The obviously have people reading accident reports and scouting for business. We haven't called either one, but I expect we will.
So what's all that got to do with a couple with a Honda del Sol, an inherited Buick and a couple of BMW motorcycles getting an SUV?
We started out looking at Subaru Outbacks because my wife has 17 miles of - in the winter, anyway - snowy road to traverse twice a day and AWD sounded like a good thing. Then we started looking at Foresters because of their splendid crash test results. Since the collision, we're all about safety.
So that's how we got seduced into SUVland just as gasoline prices were heading for the stratosphere. The good news is that we're getting about 27 mpg in the Forester with a mix of city and highway driving, which I consider to be something we can tolerate.
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