When I was about 7 years old, I was strapped in between my mom and my dad in an old 74 station wagon decked out with wood paneling and missing a hub-cap. (poor preacher-mobile) My 3 sisters were crammed in the back seat. One of my sisters, Trisha, was fast asleep after 4 hours of driving and faintly smelling exhaust. She sat, peacefully, mouth open, slightly drooling, and if there weren’t such road and hole-in-the-exhaust-pipe noise you might have heard a small resemblance of a snore. My younger sister April sat next to Trisha slowly and methodically trying to see how many small items she could place in Trisha’s mouth without waking her up. She was up to a pencil, and a piece of scrap paper, and a baby carrot. My 3rd and oldest sister, Lorrie, sat reading Gone With the Wind, for what she would remind us at every rest stop, would be for the 11th time. This was the scene, or the highlights you might say.
I sat in that front seat, at that particular moment for no real reason except boredom, contemplating why my mom and dad smelled so different. Now, my dad is a preacher, Southern Baptist that is, and quite possibly the most unorthodox Southern Baptist preacher you could ever meet. He is an ex-: marine, dairyman, truck-driver, welder, boxer, drinker, smoker, and brawler. Although the good Lord has saved him from many perils with a new life in Jesus, their is still the aroma of those things hanging about him. Maybe that’s what I smelled that morning on the way to my grandparents somewhere in the great sweltering cornfield desert between Indiana and Oklahoma.
For some reason, maybe fate, maybe the Lord decided to bring a memorable moment, whatever the reason, the stage was set for drama. It was one of those highways where you wondered if the highway department or who-ever the h-e-double hockeysticks takes care of the roads, had ever considered it as an existing part of highway reality. It wasn’t necessarily the pot holes, although there was a steady flow of them. It was the lack of shoulders that gave this day its final ingredient for horror.
It was upon this shoulderless, pot-holed, stage, that an old stray dog made his entrance. I remember thinking, “umm, he’s walkin’ kinda slow.” He just seemed to be sadly meandering. “Maybe he had the same thing happen to him as Humper,” I thought to myself. My dad had told me a story a few months before our trip about his dog named Spot (nick-named “Humper” because of his K9 philandering), and how when they had him “fixed” Humper was so depressed that he just laid down in the road until a car ran over him. In short, Humper did himself in. “But this dog looks like he’s trying,” I thought, “to slowly, very slowly, cross the road and not lay down,… not lay down.”
The next 10 seconds happened in what seemed like fast forward and slow motion simultaneously. I looked at my dad, my mom nervously says “Pat” (my dad’s name), my sister Trisha wakes up from her slumber not entirely noticing how many things are in her mouth, Lorrie tears herself away from Rhet and Scarlet, and my little sister April unsuccessfully tries to see over the front seat blocking her view. I look back and forth from my dad to the dog, my dad to the dog. As my dad starts to brake, his eyes dart to the rear-view-mirror, then to the side realizing that two semi trucks had made there way beside and behind us. And as heralds of death the truckers seem to see the dog, the brief flash of brake-lights from our family-packed station wagon, the dilemma, and simultaneously honk their horns to both warn us and hopefully scare the darn wayward dog. The dog, however, seemed to care not.
This caused Trisha and Lorrie to scream “daddy, dog!” and my little sister simply pulls her arm up and down at the truck drivers to try and get them to honk again. Knowing the peril we are all in my dad, with his thick, Oklahoma, tough-guy-born-again accent says, (while tilting his head ever-so-slightly): “well, …bye bye dog.” And the rest as Harvey says, is history.
