I graduated from Buchanan High School in the Spring of 1994, and was one of three seniors from Buchanan that year to attend the University of Notre Dame in the fall. I don’t know if I ever saw the third of us –let’s call her Becky– but I saw Laura –name changed to protect the identity of someone whose permission I did not attain before the writing of this post– on and off, especially during our Freshman Year.

Being a student at Notre Dame was hard, because the expectations were high and the pressure was always on, it seemed, to meet expectations. I remember Freshman year being a difficult time, during which I was trying to prove that I had ‘the right stuff’, which is to say that I was trying to get grades high enough to merit me staying at the University.

As Freshman year gave way to Sophomore year and Junior year and Senior year, things seemed to get easier. It was either that, or the rigors of Freshman year taught me how to do the things that were necessary to be able to succeed through the rest of the journey. In the Spring of 1998, I graduated from Notre Dame with a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology. I’ve used this degree almost every day since, psychoanalyzing just about every one I come in contact with (hee hee).

In high school, my brother and I were allowed to use a hand-me-down vehicle that my parents were finished with, for which we were extremely grateful (if I remember correctly). The car was a maroon 1987 Plymouth Horizon, which my brother and I lovingly referred to as “The Beast”. I have so many memories of that car that I could probably power a week’s worth of blog posts just talking about the crazy things that I did in that car or with that car.

But, as a student at Notre Dame in 1998, there wasn’t really much of a need for a car for me. Having family so close by, and having a roommate who had a Ford Escort on campus (shout out to Nate Van Gessel), there wasn’t much of a need for me to have a vehicle.

At the end of my senior year at Notre Dame, as a type of graduation present, my parents got me my own car. My dad bought the car from an old lady who didn’t drive it very much, so it was relatively cheap and relatively low miles. It was a 1991 baby blue Dodge Shadow. I’m guessing on the model year (my dad couldn’t remember it, either), and I don’t really remember anything else about her. As it turned out, she and I didn’t have a long relationship; I killed her.

During the spring and summer of 1998, I was working a couple of different jobs. One of them was as a graphic design specialist for the Snite Museum of Art, on the Notre Dame campus. As impressive as this might sound, it was really just a case of me knowing how to do more with a computer than play solitaire. The other gig was as a computer technician for a real estate firm in a Southwestern Michigan town. Between the two jobs, I was trying to make some money while I was also trying to figure out what to do with my life.

The baby blue Dodge Shadow came in handy for both of those jobs, as it turned out. I drove it from my home in Buchanan, across the state line into Indiana, to get to the art museum to do what they needed me to do. Then, I would go from there to my other job, helping people with their computer problems in a little real estate office in Cass County, Michigan.

During the driving, I listened to a lot of blues music –> I was really into B.B. King and Jonny Lang and the Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band that year. To get a sense of what that meant in 1998, I had a cassette tape adapter for the cassette tape player in the Shadow, and I would plug the other end into the portable CD player that I owned, so I could play the blues CDs that I was into, at the time.

Then, on a beautiful July morning, on my way to work at the art museum, it all came to an end.

I was in a through-lane, heading through an intersection, with a left-turn lane on my left and a right-turn lane two lanes over to my right. There was a semi-truck sitting in the left-turn lane, waiting for the signal to change, while I was proceeding through the intersection. For some reason that I will never know, that driver decided that 1) he didn’t actually want to turn left, but rather right, and 2) nothing mattered other than his whims. So, from the left-most lane at the intersection, he crossed over both through lanes, to get over to the right-side curb to make a right-handed turn.

This impeded my progress.

At the time that he started this asinine maneuver, I was checking my rear-view mirror to see who was behind me. When I looked back to the forward, an entire semi was stretched across my path. There was nothing for me to do, but to hit it.

As it all ended up, I hit the last tire on the end of the semi tractor exactly in the middle of the hood of my baby blue Shadow. I can still close my eyes and see the imprint of that tire rim, shoved into the metal of my car’s hood. If I had hit the semi a moment later, I could have been decapitated as I would have been forced underneath the semi trailer that followed.

The insurance agency for the trucking company ended up paying me, since the accident was the truck driver’s fault. I used that money to buy a different Dodge, later that summer, but that’s a different story.

My father came to the gas station near where the accident happened, to pick me up and take me home. My girlfriend at the time, who’s on the couch in front of me right now, scolding me for eating Reese’s Pieces as I write this story, was very distraught when she heard about the accident. I’d never been in a major vehicular incident before that morning, so it was all kind of hard to process. And the baby blue Shadow was towed to a mechanic’s yard back in Buchanan. Later that day, I went to that yard to collect my personal effects from the car.

That was truly a more sad experience than the accident itself had been, probably in the same way that identifying a body at a morgue could be more distressing than whatever would’ve caused such a death.

Yesterday (as I write this, two days ago as you read this), my family became a three-car family, with the purchase of a third vehicle. And, much in the same way that my brother and I inherited “The Beast” all of those years ago, my children are inheriting my old vehicle for their driving needs, as I inherit my wife’s previous vehicle.

Moments ago, in my driveway, as I was removing my personal effects from the car that I’ve been driving for the past seven years, I was reminded of the sadness of removing my things from the baby blue Shadow in 1998. This post was born of that triggered memory.

I hope you enjoyed it.