On the Fifteenth Day: Fifteen Scooter Crashes

When our kids were little, we bought a scooter as a second car which Paul drove to work. Every morning Paul would don his helmet and, when it was cold, pile on the layers to keep from freezing to death as he drove the scooter’s top speed of 25 mph (30 if he was going down a severely steep hill). Driving the scooter to work during the month of December was particularly brutal. After New Year’s Day, the little orange two-wheeler hibernated in the garage and we made do with one car for the rest of the winter.

During this season of our lives our source of heat was a small wood stove—also the source of gargantuan dirt and dust. One mid December evening during this season, I rented a steam carpet cleaner and went to town cleaning our rugs. For hours I ran the machine and emptied buckets of swill resulting from the mix of steam and dirt drawn from fibers, happy to be rid of some of the dirt, but mortified that we were living in so much of it on a daily basis.

I was still cleaning when Paul came home, much later than expected. He had planned to come straight home for a quick dinner as he had a dress rehearsal for a Christmas concert for which he was a soloist. I imagined had stayed late to rehearse since he was feeling a little anxious about his piece. As he entered the front door, I was just about to dump yet another bucket into the toilet. I motioned for him to come over and look at the filth, knowing he’d want to share my joy and horror. He didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry. When I looked up at him from where I was kneeling on the carpet, it was obvious that something wasn’t right. First off, his helmet was skewed; second, his face was a whiter shade of pale. Had I initially looked more carefully, I would have also noticed that his jacket was scraped and thread-bare at the elbows and that the soles of his shoes were shaved and beveled on the insole. “I hit a deer,” he finally said.

It took a few minutes to put the absurd picture together, but there it was. Paul had, in fact, collided with a buck while riding his scooter home. Thankfully there had been no cars on the road at the time of the incident; and very thankfully, he had been riding up, not down, the steepest roads at about about 10 and not 25 or 30 mph. He was also well-padded as I mentioned above. Beyond scraped hands and a somewhat damaged jacket, Paul escaped unscathed. The crash, however, hadn't seemed to deter the animal’s trajectory in the slightest; Paul explained that it had continued sailing across the road and disappeared into the darkness on the other side. When we examined the scooter later we found that the front fender was cracked and some of the hair from the animal’s coat was wedged within.

Paul went to change his clothes and get ready for his rehearsal and I put aside the cleaning and gathered the kids for dinner. As Paul left, I hugged him asked him if he was ok. “I think so,” he answered, “Fuuny thing is, I’m no longer worried about my solo.”