What if�

I just found myself playing the �what if� game and wish I hadn�t. When Little Princess was two, I had to take our car (it was a Honda Accord in those days; I loved that car) to the garage for something minor that had to be adjusted or replaced under the hood. Little Princess was with me, toddling about, never out of my watchful eye. Another mother/child team was also at the service station, a woman and her teenaged son who had just got his driver�s licence. He needed to move their car for some reason, and promptly backed it up into the place where the front and back doors meet on the driver�s side of my car. There was a fair bit of damage, but luckily there is a carrosserie in town where it was repaired, and the mother made her son pay for it.

She was amazed that I was so cool about the whole thing, and actually thanked me for �not being an asshole.� It wasn�t a big deal. It�s not like the boy totalled the car and we had to go and buy another. But the most important thing which I emphasized to this woman was that my daughter was not standing there at the time he backed up. Then I definitely would not have kept my cool. As it was, it was just a car that was injured.

Well, I was coming out of Place Belv�d�re earlier, having driven Little Princess to work and then stopped to pick something up at the pharmacy, when I remembered this incident, probaby because I was backing up in a crowded parking lot. I immediately started to imagine the alternate scenario: what if my baby girl had been in the way and this boy had crushed her between the two cars. Horrible images started forming in my mind, and all those feelings which would have been unleashed then were starting to build up now. I had to consciously calm myself down and remind myself that it did not in fact happen.

This is not the first time I have done this, and I�m sure I�m not the only person out there who plays this game. Five years ago I had a terrible car accident where I drove the Volvo head on into one of the upright girders on the bridge crossing the Massawippi River. It was a truly fortuitous thing that it was early in the morning, there was no oncoming traffic or cars behind me, and there were no pedestrians on the bridge. Besides a frozen shoulder that manifested itself a month later when we were on sabbatical in Greece, no injuries were suffered except by the car, which my wonderful garagiste rebuilt.

However, for months, nay years, afterwards, I kept playing that scene over and over in my mind, changing the scenario with all the �what ifs�. What if there had been oncoming traffic while I was fish-tailing all over the road? What if there had been a vehicle behind me which was not able to stop in time when I smashed into the bridge? What if there had been someone walking on the sidewalk who was unable to get out of the way fast enough? Actually, because I hit a girder, the sidewalk was not an issue, but what if I hadn�t hit the girder, but had gone into the railing and ended up in the frozen river? All these things played over in my mind, especially when I was trying to fall asleep at night. I think for the most part I have gotten over this trauma. But it took six weeks before I would drive a car again (and I had my baptism by fire in suburban-Athens rush-hour), and even now I am aware of my approach to the site of the accident.

Last winter was especially cold, and the bridge was icy a lot. There were more than the usual number of cars slamming into it, and one such accident put one of our English professors in the hospital for months. She was walking to the university as she does every day, and a truck with a snowplow on the front lost control and plowed into her instead, breaking both legs, one in several places. I saw her recently and she looks good. But one leg will forever be slightly shorter than the other, the lesion is still not healing properly, and she has much strength to rebuild. The city finally repaired that section of bridge properly, putting in a new railing. They also put up concrete dividers separating the road and sidewalk right where the bridge starts, because that is where the road comes out of its curve, and that is where poor Joanne was struck. I�m sure she too plays the �what if� game, and hers would definitely always have an unhappy ending.

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