blocks from their apartment. He would call Nancy as he was leaving the garage, and Nancy would be waiting
down stairs ready to help pack up the car. Gary would move to the passenger seat because Nancy preferred
to drive, and Gary was grateful for that. That Friday morning, courtesy of Angela, there was some moderate
rainfall; otherwise, it was an ordinary summer day.
As they crossed from New York to New Jersey, they talked about what they would do along the way. Gary
suggested, that since they didn’t need to rush up to the country because the rain would prevent most
outdoor work there, it might be a good idea to stop at some of the antique stores they frequented along the
way, or maybe some nurseries to see if there were any spectacular plants they might add to the Japanese
gardens they were trying to put the finishing touches on prior to the local garden club’s tour of their
property planned for the following weekend.
Driving through New Jersey on the way to Pennsylvania was uneventful. They had anticipated a heavier
down pour than they experienced. Then, about ten miles before the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border a very
scary thing happened. Their all-wheel-drive car, the fifth over the years, began to fishtail. Suddenly they
were spinning like a top across four lanes of highway heading straight into the guard rail. Nancy, who always
prided herself on being an excellent driver with razor sharp reflexes, slammed on the brakes to avoid going
in that direction; the car spun away only to find they were heading toward a large tractor-trailer. Nancy, with
her foot pushing the brake pedal as far down as it would go, turned the steering wheel as far away from the
trailer-truck as possible. The trailer was moving along at a clip much above the sixty-five mile an hour speed
limit posted. And it was a good thing. Had the semi been a second slower or had Nancy’s instincts not been
as keen as they were, they would have plowed head-on into the truck. But as Nancy’s automatic reactions
took over, she turned the steering wheel as far to the left as possible. This time they were heading again into
the guard rail. Gary felt certain that the car was going to hit the railing and flip over. But then, instead of
crashing into the guard rail, the car just stopped. It was in the same lane and in the same direction in which
they had been driving before the fishtailing began. Fortunately, there were few cars on the road and those
behind them just stopped. It had all happened within less than ten seconds. They each took a deep breath.
Nancy said, “I was sure we were going to die.” Gary responded with, “I never thought for a minute that we
were going to die.” This was quite out of character for Gary who had turned seventy six months earlier; he
had been thinking about mortality and had recently learned of the death of a dear uncle. But for some
reason he felt certain they were in no danger of dying. The front end of the car might have been destroyed,
but he knew somehow that no harm would come to them.
“There were two close calls earlier this morning on the drive out that you didn’t notice,” he told Nancy;
“First, a panel truck and later an SUV nearly side-swiped us on my side,” he explained. So, this was the third