Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll pauses at year-end to log NON-FATAL STUPIDITIES (A Partial List…). She writes:

My dear friend TonyP173 once told me in a phone conversation that in a moment of supreme gratitude to the Almighty, he had toted up some six or seven times when he SHOULD HAVE died and did not including, but not limited to, in Vietnam.

At least dying in battle confers some measure of heroism and meaning. Joe and I have accumulated quite a list of near-misses and every last one of them mind-numbingly stupid – and our own dang faults!

I have previously mentioned my taking the rowboat out on Lake Ida in Alexandria, Minnesota at about age 13 with both a windstorm and thunderstorm predicted. And then, in a rare happenstance for the Weather Service, that prediction came true, in spades. I was with a hysterical girl cousin. Oh, I don’t mean in the sense of regaling me with jokes while we fought for our lives. Not THAT kind of “hysterical,” the OTHER kind, where she had lost it to the point that she couldn’t even bail water out of the boat while I rowed. The screaming, however, definitely incentivized me to continue rowing if only to get shuck of it. The gale-force winds drowned out most of her caterwauling and within what felt like a few short weeks we made it back to the dock.

Consequence: wet clothes, blistered hands, off boat privileges, and an extremely angry father.

Then there was the time when young marrieds, Susan and Joe, about age 22, were making breakfast in their modest St. Paul apartment. We had what was called a “European” kitchen in the Real Estate ad, and we finally settled on either “Latvia” or “Albania” as the European country the ad had in mind.

All I remember is that there was only one outlet and the fridge was also plugged into it. I wanted to unplug the coffeepot and plug in the “two-seater” toaster, but the coffeepot plug was stuck. Joe was then a young man who had taken an IQ test for a job application and scored so high that he was deemed UNFIT for the job! “I’m sorry, but our experience is that people who are THIS smart do not get along well with others.” (And that might partly explain where we are today as a country…particularly at its highest reaches.)

However, on that day, at least 70 points of his IQ had deserted him. My guess would be because he was overly anxious to get the toast. All our friends and relatives have learned: Do NOT get between Joe and his meal at feeding time.

Anyhow, he dug a metal spoon into the outlet to “free” the plug and, after a loud sound that really did resemble the “ZAP!” they use in comic books, discovered that he was holding just the handle of the spoon! Oh, did I explain that he was barefoot and there was some water on the floor? And YOU thought he had “naturally-curly” hair…

He was fine, Baruch Hashem (praise God), and more’s the pity, had just missed claiming a patent on the world’s first primitive Defibrillation Machine. I should have yelled “CLEAR!”

Because we did not own a vehicle for the first seven years of our marriage, I could cite a couple of hitch-hiking adventures that almost went very wrong. Thankfully, they only involved creepy guys and not actual psychotics. It was the freewheelin’ 60s, but it was still dumb to do it. The two times that real danger was averted it was a choice between hitch-hiking and freezing to death in Minneapolis. Did I mention it was still dumb?

Weather seems to be my nemesis, in general. Like most Minnesotans, I have had several Blizzard Encounters of the Slip-Slidey Kind, one where I was getting off my night job after an ice storm and quickly realized I had less control of my car than if some fiend had been operating a remote control for it. Some kind strangers in a house near Como Park took me in until the temps hit over 34 degrees and the noon sun melted enough ice that I could finally get home. We exchanged Christmas cards for many years!

In another terrifying incident in a blizzard, I was with my three-year-old in the car, driving from Rockville to Alexandria for my mother’s birthday party. After leaving the road at least three times, I pulled off the road at a gas station in Sauk Centre, weeping, and had my Daddy come and get me! His pal rode along in his car so that he could drive Daddy’s car back while he drove mine. That’s what Daddies do. A 30-year-old is still “his little girl.”

But rain has been just as bad as snow. Once I was a Good Samaritan (that’ll learn ya), taking someone home from a meeting in St. Cloud when a major gullywasher was predicted. Had I gone straight home, I would have made it just in time. But I got caught right in the middle of a blinding rainstorm. The wipers could no way keep up and I got disoriented. When it let up just a little bit, I realized that the “white center line” I had been trying to follow was actually the line on the left hand side of the road and I had been driving in the oncoming lane for several miles. Just think of all the columns you guys would have missed! YIKES!

In my moronic youth, I had driven impaired on three or four occasions, always employing the clever strategies that drunks use to avoid detection, like driving 14 miles an hour.

On one memorable occasion, my bestie girlfriend from childhood and I were in Maui and had just had a beautiful meal at a fancy French restaurant in Olowaulu. She had driven TO the restaurant. But we were convinced by the gorgeous waiter to have 3, count ‘em 3, kir royales (a champagne cocktail) with dinner and then 3, count ‘em, 3, after-dinner coffee drinks with rum and whipped cream. The bill 40 years ago ran to $200 with a math-impaired, drunk-generous tip. Upon hearing this tale, my hippie brother-in-law memorably declared: “Boy, I remember when, if you had $200, you could quit your job!”

But I believed I was okay because Carol, a sensible, smart physician, was driving. Carol stood up shakily and said, “Uh, Susie, you better take the keys.” Uh-Oh. Seeing double, driving along steep cliffs in the dark, somehow we made it home to our condo where I promptly passed out. I have never driven drunk since. Indeed, I rarely drink at all any more. Figured I’d already had my “pass.”

Finally, and as I said above, this is only a partial list, I will end with this. Once when I was driving back from Alexandria to the Twin Cities, I got to the 694 East highway by Maple Grove and found myself following a battered pickup truck with a poorly secured mattress perched jauntily on its end in the truck bed. “That does not look safe,” I said to myself, as I blended into the next lane and scurried past it JUST as the mattress flew out of the bed and landed precisely where I had been. Brakes squealed, people drove around wildly, but by a miracle nobody crashed. I was shaking so badly that I had to pull off at the Krispie Crème.