Copyright 2010 Roberta Osborn. All rights reserved.
Stories of Luck and Grace
Like an Egg
My husband and I owned a Thai restaurant for several years. Toward the end of that period, we
were asked to cater a Saturday wedding for a party of 120 people. The Saturday before the
event, I shopped while my husband managed the store. I found the nicest sets of dishes I could
purchase in bulk for the lowest price at the local discount chain.
I bought service for 120, filled the bed of our pickup truck with the heavy boxes, and jammed
more boxes behind the seats of the truck, filling every available space. I took the dishes to the
restaurant and off-loaded them, except for the boxes behind the driver's seat, which were really
wedged in there. We had more than we could wash at that moment, as we had to keep up with
the dishes that were coming back from the dining room. I figured we had all week to get the
remaining dishes out of the truck.
My husband used the truck in the days that followed, and he also neglected to take them out,
because I had jammed them in so hard--they were just stuck.
On the Tuesday before the wedding, my husband was running errands for the store. It was
raining buckets. He accelerated to merge from a downhill entrance ramp onto the three lane
highway where people were still driving 65 miles an hour in the rain. The rear end of the truck
fish-tailed a little, just enough that the car behind him tapped him (he only remembers
accelerating suddenly without cause) and sent him spinning into the middle of the highway. My
husband was still spinning in the center lane when the semi-tractor trailer bore down on him,
striking him directly.
I was at work when I received a call from an emergency medical technician, asking me to
persuade my husband to go to the hospital. I asked the EMT if he was ok. The young EMT said,
"If he were my father, I would want him to go get checked out." My husband got on the phone. He
said he was ok. Knowing how he always tries to tough things out, I told him I would meet him at
the hospital. I asked the EMT if anyone was killed in the accident and he said no.
It took me an hour to get from DC to Baltimore. My husband was lying on a bed at UMD shock
trauma, nearly in tears, but he looked like he was in one piece. I asked him if he hit his head,
where he was hurt. He said just his knee. He was very upset, because he was certain he had
caused a massive chain reaction and caused many people to be hurt or killed. He calmed down
when I told him I had only heard about three vehicles, with no one else seriously hurt. After a full
body scan, he was given some pain medicine and discharged with a diagnosis of minor injuries.
When the accident happened, he told me, he had climbed out of the truck, looked at the driver's
side, which looked ok, and walked off the highway over to the jersey wall to sit down. In a daze,
he watched while people looked for him in the wreckage. They were surprised to find him on the
side of the road. They asked him if he was the driver and began taking care of him. He never saw
the passenger side of the truck.
We went to collect our documents from the truck in the junk lot the following day. As we
approached, the driver's side of the truck looked almost new. We opened the driver's side door.
There was a void barely large enough for a driver between the collapsed passenger side of the
truck and the driver's side door. I looked behind the driver's seat-back. The seat-back had
remained upright, in place. The dishes were still there. I pulled the torn carton apart. The dishes
were broken. They had held the seat-back in place and absorbed the shock of the impact.
Instead of being whipped back and forth and possibly thrown out of the truck, my husband had
been held in place, cradled between the seat-back and the air bag.
As we walked around the totaled truck, he finally saw the damaged passenger side and realized
how bad it had been, and how lucky he had been. A fraction of a second more of spinning, and
the semi would have hit the driver’s side. He said that if he had actually observed the caved-in
side of the truck, he might have felt a lot more injured at the scene. The insurance adjuster told
us he had never seen anyone walk away from an accident that severe.
Imagine that--hit directly by a semi-tractor trailer and just walked away. All three drivers just
walked away.
That’s what I call table service.
That's a story of luck and grace.
And we did cater the wedding. Only years later did my husband admit how much it hurt him to
carve 120 pieces of prime rib four days after his accident.
