Waiting for the bus today, I was reminded of my third grade teacher. At the time (in third grade, not waiting for the bus), I was living in Miami (Florida) and attending St. Joseph’s Catholic School.
Anywho, I only have a few strong memories of my 3rd grade teacher. On the first, she had a thing for a particular time of day: 11:11 (AM or PM, though AM was the only one applicable to us). We’d take a one minute break everyday at 11:11. The second was that my best friend and I were totally the teacher’s pets. Thirdly, she got hit by a car.
We had a substitute teacher for the latter half of my third grade year (Mrs. Bell, who was really old, hard of hearing, and bit slow on the uptake if I recall correctly). Right. We saw a picture of Miss Summers a week or two after she’d been in the hospital. In the picture (which was apparently taken shortly after the accident) she was crying. We learned that she wasn’t crying due to pain, but because her tear ducts were damaged by shards of her windshield.
So, I’ve always carried around this image of someone crying, but oddly knowing that it wasn’t a symptom of what had happened to her.
Upon finally boarding the bus, I realized that several years later, my friend Alex (the aforementioned partner in teacher’s petness) lost his brother to a drunk driver. We’d already moved several hours north, but we drove down to console them. It hit their father especially hard, since he was a police officer. I don’t think they ever caught the guy.
Of course, it’s hard to forget that my own mother got hit by a car. The three together make kind of an interesting line on a graph. Like, as I get older, a new person gets hit by a car – and they’re always closer to me than the last person.