Part Fifty-Nine: My "Brush with Death"

And clearly not with a hairbrush

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Me, home safe, and still having done nothing about my hair.

I’m walking this morning in the drizzle, with my hair exploding all around my head because I didn’t feel like pulling it up, and I notice a pickup truck pull over and stop on the other side of the street. I’m walking against traffic on the sidewalk on Oak Springs Drive, which is pretty heavily trafficked in the mornings with parents dropping kids off at Highland School and, by pulling over, the pickup truck has blocked another pickup truck from going around it. 

So, I’m watching the blocked pickup truck try to get around the stopped pickup truck when a sporty black car, zooming the other way, toward me, safe and sound, I hope, on the sidewalk, decides to politely make room for the blocked pickup to pass. Sporty car pulls all the way to the right, dangerously close to the curb and to me and my enormous hair, and I thought, holy shit, I’m roadkill. 

That’s how close the sporty car came to jumping the curb and into my lap. 

It was terrifying. 

In a flash, I pictured myself, splattered all over the sidewalk, my soul like Casper the Friendly Ghost rising out of my body, my hair like a harpy still somehow part of my person (or non-person, I guess), showing up at the Pearly Gates looking like a fat drowned rat. 

(St. Peter was not going to be pleased. And I was going to spend a pretty long time in purgatory nursing a Slim Fast – if he even let me have that.)

I hate to run and, if you ever see me running, you should run too because there’s either a shoe sale or Zombies are attacking or the Taliban’s in town or something, but this morning, even though none of those things were happening, I ran. Home. Fast. Happy to be alive. 

In case you’re wondering, no one but me noticed my brush with death. And that’s fine. Because if they had, they might also have noticed my hair!

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Thank you for taking this long, strange trip with me. I appreciate you and your many comments and emails. If you’d like to read parts 1-58, you can do so here.

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If you’d like to check out my newest book, BOUNCE: A Memoir of Resilience, you can read the first two chapters here.