Musings of a Dumb Ass

Musings of a Dumb Ass...... 54 years ago today at about 2:00 P.M. a life altering event occurred in my life that remains with me even to today. It happened about three hundred yards from airport runway 9 at Clarksville Arkansas on highway 21. Whose fault it was or how it happened is of little importance now, what is extra-ordinary about the event and what stays with me is really about time and the speed that it passes, depending on circumstances at the time. Memory of that accident is one of the things that has interested and mystified me about time and its qualities my entire life. I believe that time is constant as a whole, but may vary in the realm of traumatic events and may also have a different passage value for other species. This makes me a crazy man in a world of rigid time structure, and in fact probably crazy in any other structure also, but 'things' sometimes simply consumes me if there are no absolute answers that you can go to bed with and still be satisfied when you wake up. I was waiting for my uncle to pick me up at the side of 21 highway and had crossed the road so as to be on the correct side for him to just pull over so I could tell him to wait while I told my mother he was there, and I could go home with him and spend the night at his little hill farm about 12 miles out in the sticks. In a short while his big log truck came into view and when he seen me by the roadside he pulled over to see what was up. I jumped up on the running board of the passenger side and shouted for him to wait while I went and told my mother I was going home with him. Not waiting for a reply, I jumped down and ran in front of his huge truck, engine still running, and ran onto 21 highway at fullspeed just as Emil Dlugosh was passing in his pick-up truck. No one knows for sure how fast Emil was going. Afterwards he said about 30, but until his death my Uncle Corby, watching from the drivers seat of his still running log truck, swore he was doing at least 50. When I collided with Emil's '48 chevy pick up, it was the most thunderous and consuming power I had ever, and to this day experienced. But what happened next was the most incredible journey I ever made, and am reasonably certain, never to make again. I connected first with the side of my head on the right headlight of Emil's pickup and it broke. It was an explosion in my ear with a tremendous amount of roaring, but that's when something happened to the passage of time that still fascinates me. When the headlight shattered, it was as if time slowed almost to a stop and I heard the glass tinkling and rattling and I felt the side of my face on it as it gave way. The tinkling glass took its time and I really don't remember leaving the headlight but I became aware of being airborne and the wind tickling my hair. I don't remember connecting back to the pavement, but when that happened I came down on the top of my head and peeled the hair off the top of my skull. The next thing I do remember was Emil's truck attacking me again as it caught up to me. This time the truck passed over me and I was aware of being wallowed around under the screaming engine that sounded like a thousand sawmills and was aware of the oil on the oilpan burning me as I was scooted around underneath the still moving truck. I believe I was about halfway under the truck when I felt my best pair of jeans being torn, and distinctly remember thinking my mother would probably whail the daylights out of me over that. I remember sliding and rotating around flat of my back and as the truck kept passing over me and it seemed like it had been a very long time at this point. Of course Emil was doing his best to stop, and I remember thinking as the truck rear wheel slid over one leg and I felt the shoe slip off my other foot, "So this is how it feels to die..." I don't remember being afraid or frantic, just resigned. The next thing I remember was relative silence, and someone standing over me shading me from the sun with his shirt, then I remember the ambulance backing up to where I was laying in the road, and my mother screaming. Later on, my Uncle told me the ambulance scraped me off the highway 66 feet from the original point of impact. Needless to say, my life was very uncertain for three days, and I really don't recall a lot of specifics for some time, but amputation of my left leg was discussed, but a grandfather I will aways be beholden to would have no such option considered, and stubbornly sat by my bedside daring the first to try it. He won out and 8 days after the accident, surgery far beyond its time was done on my leg. It was then 5 months in a body cast, 13 more months in a leg cast and it was time for me to learn how to walk again. I recovered and things are fine with me as I get old, but this 'time' thing..... how does that work? According to my Uncle, the entire accident happened in 5..maybe 6 seconds. But for me it slowed down enough for me to experience and remember what seemed to me a journey of near eternity, colliding with and rolling around underneath that moving pick up truck, with full awareness and specifics of what I was experiencing as it happened. Now when I think of time, is it the same for all things? Is the 17 day life of the housefly the same for it, as the 80 years for an old man? Is the year that me and my little dogs share the same for both of us? Or do they actually experience several years living while I'm experiencing one? Is the dimension of time as it moves through our world a phenonoma that has many dimensions outside our own personal space, or did that truck possibly warp my brain?......................