On a rather beautiful, sunny Saturday afternoon, while playing in the front yard of some close family friends that his parents were visiting, Steve and Sheryl watched a woman driving dangerously fast on the street by the front yard. She was obviously in a real hurry. About a half block down the street the car swerved and drove right into a telephone pole. The telephone lines over his head were shaking violently, and the telephone pole the woman drove into was snapped in half. When the car hit the telephone pole it made a loud crunching noise and there was the sound of smashing glass. Steve had never witnessed an accident before, but he could tell something wasn’t right with the people in the car, because nobody was moving around inside.
Steve turned and looked toward the house. He figured with all the noise the car made when it hit the telephone pole that everybody in the house should have heard it. Plus, all they had to do was look out the window and see the telephone lines shaking.
Steve shouted toward the house, turned and looked at the crunched car and then back at the house. Nobody was coming out to see what Steve was shouting about. So Steve ran full speed from the curb across the lawn, up the porch steps and burst through the front door into the house shouting that a car had an accident. Sheryl ran down the street to get a closer look.
Of course, nobody would believe him. Steve kept pleading for somebody to come outside and look down the street. He would run out to the end of the front yard and look down the street and start pointing and then run back to the house and start yelling to come see the accident. After what seemed like forever to Steve, one of the adults, after discussing the situation with everyone, agreed to go out to the end of the lawn and see if Steve was really telling the truth this time.
By the time the ambulance arrived, everybody had pitched in to help. There was a baby in the front seat that someone had snatched up and wrapped in a blanket whose head looked very badly bumped, there was a big not growing on its forehead, while someone else was warning not to let the child go to sleep because it might be a concussion. The woman behind the wheel was bleeding all over her face. She must have hit the steering wheel. She was slumped over with her chin on her chest, her eyes closed. Steve couldn’t tell if she was breathing. As she regained consciousness, she started to cry. She was asking questions about her children.
Some man was talking to the woman behind the steering wheel. His voice concerned and a very worried look on his face. He knew the lady, and he was asking all kinds of questions. Turns out, the man was her husband and the father of the children. He was there because it had something to do with his job. He had no idea that he would be showing up to an accident involving his whole family.
The ambulance took the woman and children away and the police kept doing police stuff. One policeman had a handle attached to a bicycle wheel and was counting how far the black tire marks went.
The car didn’t look so good. The front of the car was wrapped around the now broken telephone pole. It looked to Steve that the only thing holding the telephone pole up, was the wires attached to it. There was broken glass from the headlights all the way onto the sidewalk and there was some kind of green liquid dripping from the front of the car and running down the curb. The car’s windshield had a crack in front of the passenger seat. That must have been where the baby hit it because the shape was kind of small and round. A tow truck hooked up to the car and took the car away while another man swept up the street.
Steve pretty much stopped telling stories after that adventure. It seemed to take a long time to get someone to believe there had really been an accident. This time his words were not believed, and he felt responsible for the time it took to get someone to help. Steve was beginning to understand how valuable simply telling the truth could be. In this case it could have been life or death; he didn’t discuss this with anyone, he was too embarrassed.
That Saturday supplied a lot to talk about over the Bar-B-Que dinner that had been cooking on the big oil drum grill all afternoon. Steve loved the Bar-B-Ques his parents always managed to arrange on weekends, usually after his dad went hunting. There was usually a big metal tub filled with ice and lots of cans of beer and soda pop.
Big slabs of venison soaked in beer all morning, then thrown on the grill to cook. Beer was poured on the coals to cool down flair-ups to keep the steaks from burning. The steam from the beer on the red-hot coals gave the tender meat an especially good flavor. Potatoes wrapped in foil would cook under the grill, surrounded by hot coals.
Steve’s favorite dishes were the Jell-O chiffon salad, corn on the cob with a lot of butter and the big tray of meats and veggies and sweet pickles and the big green olives. Steve always took out the red pimento before he ate the olive. Big tubs of chips and quarts of fresh homemade dip, usually onion, made drinking gallons of soda pop a daylong priority. Somebody always brought a big pot of homemade chili, made from an old secrete Mexican recipe, which had been cooking for a couple days before, so the spices had time to gather steam. Long slabs of fresh French bread, coated with a mixture of real butter and fresh garlic, were placed on the grill and lowered to brown just before dinner was to be served; after dinner there was watermelon. Steve had two slices, about one more than he had eaten in a long time, but on this sunny Saturday afternoon the food was as great as ever and Steve’s hunger at its peak.
This Saturday would be remembered, especially the look of disbelief on everyone’s face when he came running into the house to report the accident. Steve never forgot how that felt. That was a feeling he never wanted to experience again.
By the time Steve turned eight, his father had built a single car garage just behind and to the left of Steve’s bedroom. Right next to the garage and at the back of the small lot he built an entertainment center over a large concrete slab complete with a sound system, brick Bar-B-Que., running water and electricity for the stereo, rotisserie and floodlights that filled up the back half of the lot. It had a roof over the cooking area and trellis over the rest of the large concrete slab. A big picnic table finished off the facility.
With the addition of the garage and entertainment patio, the value of the old house made moving into a bigger house possible. His Mom and Dad re-finished all the wood floors, re-landscaped the front yard, and painted both inside and outside. The house sold and the family moved to a brand new three-bedroom tract home, just a few miles north of the city. Steve had just turned ten.