Legs Make Lasting Impressions

While preparing lunch yesterday, my son walked inside and grumbled that he had trouble pulling his truck out because I had put on the emergency brake. He also wanted lunch, but not what I was having. I looked down at my dish which I had artfully arranged Mrs Paul’s fishsticks and a bun. Wondering why on the first day of Lent someone did not want loaves and fishes, certainly seemed odd, especially fish shaped fish. But, after informing my son where he was theologically lacking, I also told him the importance of an emergency brake. And the necessity of not running out for lunch, but maybe making do with what’s already in the kitchen.

In a state as flat as Louisiana and in an era of automatic transmissions, many seem to forget the emergency brake. Some don’t know where it is, or what it is. And others just like to hear it make that crunchy, grindy sound that feels good when you’re really mad and need to stomp on something. With me, it’s second nature, just like it should have been to others in decades long past.

Like the one when I was about 5 and happily playing in the den on one cozy winter evening while my parents were enjoying a rare visit from my newly married cousin and her husband. The fire was crackling, and my cousin was showing my mother her new blanket she was crocheting with millions of rosettes from the Make-Your-Own-Rosette-Machine from TV. This scene embedded itself in my childhood mind in more ways than one. I love crackling fires, and also own every gadget ever "seen on TV."

She and her young husband really wanted some pizza. She continued demonstrating her crocheting prowess while the men went out for pizza. Now where they were actually going to get pizza in Doyline at 9 PM in 1975, I really have no idea. There wasn’t a pizza place within 100 miles at that hour.

Had somebody decided in 1975 to go gather some eggs, that would have been a real possibility. Or even bring home a string of perch. Or grab the axe next to the door and go out for a hunk of veal. But pizza? Maybe they were going to New Orleans? Or New York even. Or maybe for a case of tomato soup and Bisquick.

Suddenly my father was busting in the door speaking in some sort of garbled foreign tongue with his cigar bouncing up and down in his mouth with his obvious agitation. The women screeched, jumped up, grabbed me, and rushed outside.

Evidently my father had pulled his car to the front of the house, while waiting for my cousin to grab his jacket out of his own car. As my cousin trotted down the hill and began to climb in the station wagon, his own car slipped out of gear and rolled down the hill, smashing into the passenger side door of the very car he was halfway in.

This involved a lot of pain and blood on my cousin’s part. And a lot of scrambling for keys to remove the rogue car off his leg. Then my screaming and crying mother and cousin running up to rush in the still smashed station wagon to the hospital.

I was very young and very confused. Overhearing my father had closed his eyes while moving my cousin’s smashed leg because of fear of what he might see, I was part of the dark rocket ride to a hospital while he rested his bleeding leg in a box that my mother had placed under his shoe. It looked very much like a tomato soup carton.

It all ended well. We returned home in a few hours with only a badly broken leg and no irreparable damage, a big cast, a new marriage that was once again surrounded in a tangible bubble of love, and a lesson well learned. I traced the imprinted pattern of his leg on the interior casing of the car door for weeks before my parents were able to have it repaired, while the memory imprinted forever in me the importance of emergency brakes.

And after relaying this story, yet one more time, I told my son we really didn’t need to go out for lunch. How would he feel if I whipped him up something tasty with tomato soup and Bisquick?