gottagotaworkbye!
I just found out that someone was killed two weeks ago in a car wreck in California.
His name was Corey; he was 28 years old; he wasn’t wearing a seat belt and was thrown from the vehicle.
In 1979 my family moved into the house my mother still owns. Among the neighbors, across lots (one walked through our backyard and theirs to get to their back door) are an elderly couple who have lived there all their lives, raised their children there, and frequently baby-sat two of their grandchildren. We befriended this couple and, by extension, their grandkids, who were 7 and 3, a girl and a boy. The boy was Corey.
Over the next several years I occasionally sub-babysat Corey, enduring Scooby Doo and The Dukes of Hazzard when I couldn’t get him out of the house, and taking him along on my treks to the post office when I went to get the mail.
I saw him once more after I left home in 1985; I came back on leave from Fort Bragg in 1989, and wanted to take my dad out in my new car; Corey was at his grandparents’, and we picked him up and took him along. He was 13 then.
I never saw him again, though my mother did.
In spite of having seen him in ’89, the first thought I have when I think of him comes from a photo I took in the summer of 1983, just after I graduated high school; a sturdy little fellow of 7, standing in his grandparents’ yard, a doghouse and some country woods in the background.
To all and sundry: Wear Your Damned Seat Belts!
I’m thinking of scripting a PSA in support of Michigan’s "Click it or Ticket" campaign. The tagline would be "If you get a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt, be glad it’s the worst you got. You could die, and that would hurt more people you can readily count." Or words to that effect.
And my spaghetti is boiling over, so I end this post.