| The day after my parents were married, their car soared off the road and landed upside-down in a ditch.
I remember hearing this for the first time when I was about nine years old. I was in the kitchen with my mother, who was telling the story to a friend on the phone. My parents were driving from New York to Montreal for their honeymoon and heading along a stretch of Canadian farmland when the accident happened. My mother recalled how once the car had stopped rolling, she and my father rolled down their windows (luckily, car windows were not electric back then), and some French-speaking farmers helped them climb out of the car.
“Not a scratch on either of us!” my mother laughed to her friend on the phone.
She then went on to talk about other things, as if this were not a big deal—just one of those wacky things that happen sometimes in life. Later, she told me that the farmers rolled the car back over, and before long she and my dad resumed their trip.
For a long time, I couldn’t believe how casual my mom was about the whole thing. But more recently, I’ve come to see that my mother’s way of processing the story was a form of self-protection. She was the kind of person who hated being afraid of anything—and so she found a way to make this event more of an adventure than a near-catastrophe. |
