This morning Lisa got up and looked at her phone.

Lisa: “Where’s your phone?”

Me: “Charging in my office – why?”

Lisa: “I missed a call from [Lee's sister] Charlotte at 7:00 AM. I had the ringer turned off.”

I went and got my phone.

“Damn. Missed call from Charlotte at the same time.”

I called Charlotte. Turns out that my 81-year-0ld mom got clipped by a school bus mirror while she was out walking in the near-dawn grey this morning. They took her to the ER, where CT/MRI showed nothing unusual. They stapled her up and sent her home, [1] saying she’d be sore today. She says her shoulder hurts worse than anything.

My mom lives to walk. It’s what she does – like sharks swim, like B.B. King plays the guitar. She used to do 5-8 miles a day until the doctor told her to cut back. She’s “down to” 3-5 miles per day. My folks live out in the semi-country in the same house they moved into when I was three. I guess it’s coming up 50 years now. Where mom walks, there are no sidewalks, no streetlights. In my youth, you could walk along the “main road” (Glen Mill Road, 20854, if you’re keeping score at home) and rarely see a car. Now it’s a major thoroughfare for people trying to avoid the massive traffic on I-270 coming into DC from the further suburbs.

Mom goes out early (6:00 AM-ish) every morning and walks. She knows all the school bus drivers, the kids waiting for the buses, the moms and au pairs waiting with the kids, etc. She pets the horses and ultimately ends up back home or at Annabelle Kuldell’s house (the Kuldells beat us into the neighborhood by a year or two) for coffee. There is a high probability that the school bus driver who clipped mom knows her and is having a pretty awful day him/herself. Mom was worried the kids on the bus would be late to school.

Here’s the thing: two more inches and she would have been dead. A Duke computer department staffer was killed my sophomore year there – he was riding a bicycle and a truck mirror hit him. We can’t tell mom not to walk. Might as well tell a shark… well, you get the idea.

So I guess this is a wake-up call. The problem is that the solution is not obvious. In the meantime, think recuperative thoughts for my mom, Peggy Jones.

===================

[1] In a paper gown – they cut her clothes off her.