Scary news this week here in the neighborhood. A girl who goes to school with Lil' S1 -- a friend of a friend of his -- got hit by a car while walking to the bus stop in the morning. She's alive and will likely make a full recovery, but it messed her up pretty good from what I understand. Apparently, her jaw is broken and currently wired shut. She broke both arms and both legs and got scratched and bruised to hell. She's bedridden for the time being and is not expected to be able to walk for at least six weeks. The bright-side is that kids are super resilient,* and it usually is true that what doesn't kill them only makes them stronger. For adults, this is a silly old saw (my shoulder arthritis is most definitely not making me stronger), but for children it's quite apt.
*I also got hit by car when I was a child. It wasn't nearly as bad as the one this poor girl was involved in, but I did badly sprain my leg and was supposed to wear a splint and walk with crutches for about a month. After a few weeks, however, the splint came off, and I was using my crutches to help me run up the wall and do quasi-backflips. One weird thing, though, is that although I recovered in-full fairly quickly, to this day I can still "feel" the sprain in my heel somehow. It's like a ghost pain that doesn't hurt. I don't know how else to describe it.
When something like this happens, I think every parent immediate thinks of their own children. This one particularly hits home for me because I know exactly how it could happened, and I worry about it every time Lil' S1 walks through the neighborhood. There's one street that is super busy--it's a major DC artery--and it keeps me up at night, because the unsettling truth is that there is very little you can do to keep your kids safe from cars. Of course, you can drill into them all the safety rules--look both ways, use a crosswalk, etc., and we do--but they're not going to follow every rule every time, because they're, you know, kids. And even if they do, it won't matter much if they happened to encounter the wrong driver at the wrong place and time. It's quite frightening to think that luck--or perhaps lack of bad luck--is the main thing keeping your children safe from cars, but it's kinda true.
In this case, it's unclear whether or not the girl was jaywalking. Lil' S1 says she was, but his source is a sixth-grader who may or may not have even been there when it happened. It does seem that she didn't cross at a stoplight, which is now safety rule number one for my kids on that street: Only cross at a stoplight, no matter what!
There are other crosswalks on that street that are not at a stoplight, but using them is no safer than jaywalking. In fact, it might be less safe. Those types of crosswalks--the ones with no stoplight that stretch across arterials with multiple lanes in each direction--should not even be allowed, in my opinion. They are supposed to be for the benefit of the pedestrian, but in some cases they make it worse for them. When I'm driving, I actually don't stop to let people cross at such crosswalks when I see them waiting on the sidewalk (if they are already in the crosswalk then of course I stop). I used to, but what often happens is the cars behind me, not seeing the pedestrian (perhaps because my car is blocking their view) and not knowing why I'm stopping, go around me in the other lane -- or cars that are already in the other lane just don't stop, for whatever reason. This creates a super perilous situation for the walker, because I'm blocking their view and cars are zipping around right into their path.
Plus, when a pedestrian sees you stop, they often feel socially compelled to cross and might put themselves at risk out of a misguided sense of politeness. It's just a bad scene all-around. I wish all cars would always stop for street-crossers, but they don't, and it makes things worse to pretend that they do. So, now, if I see somebody waiting to cross, I'm like, Sorry, pedestrian, you can wait until it's totally clear or walk the extra few blocks to the stoplight. It's for your own good.
In other news, it was family Covid booster day for us today. It kinda sucked, but now it's done. S had a difficult time finding us appointments for some reason. The only thing available within the search radius was at a CVS in a kinda shady part of the city, and a CVS in a kinda shady part of the city is never a fun place to spend an afternoon. They are always super crowded and understaffed and anything costing more than $10 is locked away in a plastic case like you're in a prison commissary.
Our appointment was at 4:00 pm, and the lady giving the shots was ready around 4:10, which isn't terrible, but there was one kid ahead of us, about nine or ten years old, and he refused to get his shot. It was so aggravating. I was experiencing kid-shot PTSD watching it. I was about 30 seconds away from asking if we could go ahead of him (I was going to frame it as if I was trying to be helpful, "Maybe it would be good if he saw all of us get our shots first"), but then he looked at me, and I gave him a smile and big thumbs up, and he got his jab. I'm not saying I was the reason why, but I'm not not saying that either.
We all got our shots and could have been on our way fairly quickly (somehow Lil' S1 is okay with shots now, which is weird and good; he didn't freak out about his flu shot either), but of course the kids wanted to buy something, and of course S said they could, and of course there was a long line and no self checkout and an incredibly slow guy working the cash register. We probably were actually only there about 45 minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. I was like Dirk Diggler in the middle of this scene. Sir, we gotta split, man. We gotta go.
So far, no ill effects from the booster. Everybody else has a sore arm, but I don't even have that. Although, I got the jab in my right arm, the one with the arthritic shoulder, and it could be the case that that arm is so messed up already that I can't discern pain from the shot and normal everyday existence. That's probably not a good thing in general, but in this case it works out in my favor.
Until next time...
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