“It’s your car…you have to tell him!” “No, you were driving it…you have to tell him”. The conversation went back and forth for about fifteen miles until we got back into town. Regardless, Dad would see the dent in my sisters Mustang the minute that we pulled in the driveway; so one of us had to tell him about the “incident”. We both had our licenses and were allowed to drive with passengers in the vehicle. Did we have to report it to the police? Were we supposed to call the insurance company? What about the mailbox that we ran over? Was that considered to be “leaving the scene of an accident?” Did we break federal violations? It all happened so fast that I’m really not sure what caused me to lose control of the car. It certainly was not going to be because I was driving carelessly.
We had spent the whole day at the beach. I always get light-headed if I spend the entire day out in the hot summer sun. Could the reason for the crash be that I had sun stroke, got disoriented and lost control of the car?
The road was privately maintained and was full of potholes the size of craters. I just remember my sister and I laughing while looking through the rearview mirror at all of the dust we were making. We sure thought we were on the “Dukes of Hazzard” blazing our way down over the steep gravel hill. Perhaps I struck a pothole which caused the car to spiral out of control down the hill. Sure…that was it!
I had a tendency to drive fast, do doughnuts and squeal my brakes and act inappropriately with my defensive driving skills. “No..this isn’t what happened”--I told myself. I had to convince myself and my sister that this “episode” was not based on my reckless actions because if Dad found out the truth he would be very disappointed.
The old saying “the truth hurts“ is so very true. My father stared at the car for a minute and looked at us with that paternal “I know you’re telling me stories” look on his face. I almost thought that I would be able to convince him that the cause for the car veering off the road was because of something else--not from driver inattention. How could he possibly know what I was doing in another town fifteen miles away? He looked at me and said “I know exactly what happened. You were going twenty miles faster than you should have been and you got over in the loose dirt and lost control of the car--that‘s what happened.” The truth sure hurt at that moment. That was the end of the discussion and I never drove recklessly on a dirt road ever again!
This is a little loose for my English teacher soul; I like a clear preview at the end of graf 1 and not an ironic teaser. But I see how those loose topic sentences in grafs 2/3/4 do the job. I admire the outro completely.
ReplyDeleteGlad to take it for your first five-graf essay. You're on your way!