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Three Near Destiny Experiences |
by Hardy Jones
Before the age of ten I had three near death experiences.
The first one came while I was in the womb...can a person have a near death experience before being born? Perhaps what I thought was my first near-death experience was really my nearly-not-born experience. Either way you look at it, Mom became pregnant with me when she was thirty-six. Between her age and birth control, Mom did not believe she could be pregnant. She did know her body, and it told her something was not right, which brought her to Dr. ----. He drew blood, tested her, and decided that all she needed to feel right was a hysterectomy. Mom did not believe such a drastic measure was necessary, and she ventured to another doctor. This medical genius gave her medicine to induce menstruation. After two months of regular periods, Mom luckily had the good sense to stop taking the medicine.
Mom at last found Dr. Payne, who told her she was five months pregnant. I was born on December 20, 1972, two weeks early, and only five pounds. On top of that, the soap the hospital used me broke me out in a rash. On the plus side, my rash made me easy for Dad to find in the nursery the night of my deliver when he and a friend drunkenly searched for me. I was kept in pediatrics for two more weeks and fed every two hours with an eye dropper -- my mouth was too small for a bottle or Mom's nipple.
The feeding every two hours continued when I was released, culminating when I was six months old and weighed twenty-two pounds.
My second near death experience came when I was two years old. Mom's ex-husband Clovis had committed suicide a little after I was born, and Mom's four daughters from that marriage moved in with us. Before I was born, my parents had lived on a sport-fishing boat; they had enjoyed cruising the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, but with my birth and then the importation of four teenage girls, they bought a house. Dad still had the boat, and they were stocking up for a weekend excursion down the Florida gulf coast when I almost died. Mom carried me to the boat and placed me on the boat's railing. Becky the second oldest, carried bags of groceries to the boat, only, instead of stepping on to the deck, she jumped: the boat shook and I fell overboard.
"My God!!!!!" Mom yelled, and Becky let out an ear piercing scream.
Dad was at the car getting more bags of groceries, but when he heard their ruckus, he ran to the boat and saw me floating feet up down river. Depending on Mom's mood when she tells this story, I was underwater anywhere from several seconds to a few minutes. Dad, an ex-high school swimmer, dove in the water, swam to me, and he said, when my head came out of the water, I blew a whale-like spout in his face. He swam back to the boat and checked me for injuries, didn't find any, but called off the boat trip. Dad always liked to add to this story that he had a five-thousand dollar check in his wallet that did not get wet.
I don't recall those two near death experiences and I wasn't complicit in them, but the third was all my fault. I was ten years old and leaving Mariner Mall in Pensacola with my friend Chad Irby. The mall was only a few blocks from our house, but to begin our walk home, we had to cross a four-lane street. It was about dusk during the summer, and traffic was heavy and backed up. Chad and I waited for an opening, but the cars seemed endless, and if I wasn't home before dark, Dad would have a whipping waiting on me. The center turning lane was backed up with over a dozen cars, and the next lane was dominated by an eighteen-wheeler. The far lane, however, had intermittent traffic, and we took advantage of the two clogged lanes to make it three-fourths of the way across the street. I looked under the eighteen-wheeler, didn't see any cars' tires, and ran blindly across the last line. When I emerged from behind the eighteen-wheeler a station wagon barreled at me. The driver was a young man with his wife in the passenger seat and their son in the back seat; their faces stretched grotesquely in the shock that they were about to kill a stupid boy who didn't think to look before crossing the street. My saving grace was that I crossed the lane in a full run, which propelled me as I leapt for the curb and the station wagon's bumper grazed my back leg.
The station wagon slammed its brakes and stopped a little past me. Their son had dark red hair sitting in a pile on top of his head and he stared at me bug-eyed and slack jawed. The wife rolled down her window. I expected a reprimand.
"Are you ok?"
"Yes, ma'am. I'm so sorry."
The car behind them tooted its horn, and as the couple rolled away the wife reached in the backseat and patted her son's head.
Chad easily crossed a minute later, and when he joined me, he said: "I'm glad you didn't die. If you had, my dad wouldn't let me out of the house no more this summer."
We laughed and my heart raced until I got home. I never told my parents about that incident, and I wonder what has become of that young couple. In their home, I imagine that I became an admonition: "Don't be reckless like that boy in front of the mall."
I was lucky not to have been hit by the car. I may not have died from the impact, but I would have been injured; how severely....The first two experiences, when I heard them as a child, made me feel special: I'd already beaten long odds, perhaps I had a destiny. A child thinks of destinies and why he, in particular, like the heroes in stories he heard in school and church, was spared in order to achieve greatness. An adult, however, learns to appreciate the costs and joys of living, and, in them, finds as much contentment as he can.
Hardy Jones's nonfiction and fiction has appeared in over twenty journals, he has been awarded two grants, and his novel Every Bitter Thing is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in May 2010.
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